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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, I apologise for having arrived a few minutes late for this debate due to my train being late. I apologise, in particular, to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, the beginning of whose speech I missed. As other noble Lords have done, I congratulate him on initiating this debate. I declare an interest as a former member of the foreign service, which I served for 11 years. It is not surprising, therefore, that I agree with noble Lords who have supported that service. They are absolutely right. I think, in particular, of the speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and my noble friend Lord Patten. They were not the only ones; I just select them because they come from different sides of the House and there has been support for that line of argument from both sides. I simply believe that the foreign service is the best organisation that I have ever had contact with. I remember 20 years or so ago attending a reception at No. 10 Downing Street given by the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who was then Prime Minister, which was for a visiting team of members of the Chinese government. I think that there were five of them, rather remarkably. They came into the room and walked up to the Prime Minister, whom they recognised, and shook her hand. They then looked around the room and they clearly did not recognise anyone apart from one young woman, Kathy Flower, who had been presenting a programme in the English language on Chinese television. They all knew her by sight. I guess that every other member of the Chinese government would have known her if they had been there. One of the problems with the Treasury’s attitude towards the foreign service is that it is constantly going in for false economies, when it goes for economies, and they are not always the right ones. I served in Cambodia 40 years ago when Cambodia had just become independent after the end of the French Vietnam war. Phnom Penh, which was a delightful little town, was inundated with new embassies. It had not had embassies before because it was only a province of French Indochina. We had a vast American embassy, and we had a tiny British embassy consisting of seven Brits. Other countries had big embassies. That created an enormous housing problem, because houses for western or American people did not exist in any quantity. One of my main tasks as head of chancery was to find new housing for the staff, which was not at all an easy job. I used to drive around Phnom Penh, which fortunately had a grid system as Manhattan does, and stop at every crossroads and look down the road in each direction to see if there were any piles of bricks. If there were, that meant that a Cambodian was building a new house, so I followed that up. I was so impressed by the problem that I made a study of the costs that would be incurred if the British embassy bought a piece of land big enough to house the chancery and all the other necessary staff residences. I got a deal with a Cambodian general who owned some land, and he agreed that he would sell it if the British government would agree. The calculation that I made was that we would pay for the whole purchase of the land and the cost of construction in two and a half years. My house at that time—1956—which was in the Cambodian quarters, up on bricks, was costing us £4,000 a month. I thought that was ridiculous, so I sent a report to London urging that we should follow up the idea of buying a property. It was turned down, no doubt because of Treasury opposition. The Treasury’s view was that it might only last for two and a half years; in fact it lasted for 20 years, and we still have it now after an interval during the era of Pol Pot. That is a great error. Soon after I came back to this country from Cambodia, I came across an ambassador who had raised with the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat Amory, the question of why we insisted on renting so many properties abroad and not building or buying. The Chancellor’s answer was, ““What policy?””. Apparently no one had consulted him about that very expensive means of proceeding. The other thing that I want to mention is the tendency for the Government to abolish embassies and high commissions abroad. A list of eight small countries where we are closing or have closed embassies or high commissions was published in Hansard on 11 October at col. WS 13. They are not important countries. Many of them are in the Pacific, which is a very large ocean and a lonely place. It is worth having a small staff in most of these missions for reassurance and in recognition of the fact that all of them have the same vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations as this country does. I am talking about eight countries in this latest bunch of calculations. It may be said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has displayed an interest in foreign affairs in his visits to South Africa and to the Far East. That is a sudden interest on his part, and I wondered whether it meant that there would be a change in his attitude towards the expenditure on the foreign service. I am afraid that I was struck by doubt whether it might in fact be intended to help the promotion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.