1 BDOHP Interview Index and Biographical Details Sir Stephen Wright KCMG (2006), CMG (1997). (Born 7 Dec 1946, son of J H Wright, CBE and Joan Wright; m 1st, 1970 (marr. diss 2000); one son, one daughter; 2nd, 2002, Elizabeth Abbott Rosemont Biographical Details with (on right) relevant pages in the interview: Foreign Office, Rhodesia Political Department, 1968 pp 3-5 3rd Secretary, Havana, 1969-71 pp 7-20 Civil Service College, 1971-72 pp 21-23 Foreign Office, 1972-75 pp 23-28 British Information Services, NY 1975–80 pp 28-41 UK Perm Rep to EC, Brussels, 1980-84 pp 43-51 FCO, 1984–85 pp 52-54 Seconded to Cabinet Office, 1985–87 pp 54-59 Counsellor and Head of Chancery, New Delhi, 1988–91 pp 59-71 Counsellor (External Relations) and pp 71-74 UK Perm Rep to EC, Brussels, 1991–94 Assistant Under-Secretary of State, later Director, pp 74-78 EU affairs, FCO, 1994–97 Minister, Washington, 1997-99 pp 78-85 Director, Wider Europe, FCO, 1999-2000 pp 85-89 Deputy Under-Secretary of State, FCO, 2000-02 pp 89-101 Ambassador to Spain, 2003-07 pp 101-116 Reflections on the Diplomatic Service p 117 2 RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR STEPHEN WRIGHT KCMG RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY ABBEY WRIGHT AW: This is the 21st February 2015 and Stephen Wright is in conversation with Abbey Wright who is recording his recollections of his diplomatic career. Stephen, you joined the Service in 1968 and I know your father was a retired Ambassador. Was it always a shoo-in that you were going to go into the Service? SW: No it wasn’t a shoo-in but it was the career I knew something about, having lived in it. I was always interested in it, partly, as you say, because my father was in it and also because I had lived some of the life that my parents lived and I liked the life. I liked the fact that they lived overseas but retained their very strong connections through their position with home, with the UK. I wanted to continue that. But I did look around when I was in my last year at university for other jobs too. I think the reason why I ended up in the Diplomatic Service was firstly for those reasons I’ve given and secondly because I thought it was very relevant to my history degree which I’d enjoyed at university and I always thought of history as a very good preparation for international affairs, because a lot of it is international affairs of the past. For practical reasons, the selection process for the Civil Service started earlier than all the other selection processes did, so it seemed a no-brainer to apply and see how far you would get and, finally, that the selection process was more thorough and more professional than any of the others than I encountered. But I did look at other careers. I came to the conclusion before the end that if I was offered a job in the Diplomatic Service, that’s the job that I would take. I looked at banking and I looked at Shell and so on but there were fewer opportunities to work overseas in those days. AW: Did they still do the weekend away selection process, or interviews …? SW: It was a whole selection process but it wasn’t a weekend, it wasn’t the country house. The main part of it was a two-day selection board which took place in London and consisted of a whole mixture of exercises and I thought it was pretty well done. Then there was a final formal interview with a panel of interviewers which was quite frightening. AW: Do you remember who they were? 3 SW: I don’t I’m afraid, I wasn’t told in advance, at least I don’t think I was! AW: Then you joined, what did that entail? SW: I joined on the 3rd September 1968 along with about twenty other people and we started off being told to report to an office called Curtis Green which is now about to become the Headquarters of the Metropolitan Police after years of disuse. It’s on the Embankment across Whitehall from the FCO and that’s where, in those days, the training was done. We started on a two week induction course of which I don’t really remember a great deal. I think the main value of the course was to get to know the other members of the intake of that year so we had a ready-made bunch of friends and colleagues with whom we could talk during the rest of the first year until we were all dispersed to posts. We were talked to by a Minister, we were talked to by senior officials of the FCO, we were told about various aspects of the work but it was a lot of being talked at. I think the main thing I remember about it and perhaps the most valuable bit of the whole course was the rather basic instruction on how to maintain a file and how to manage papers in the way that the FCO did it. AW: Then were you all sent to departments? SW: Yes, I was allocated to a department called Rhodesia Political Department. There were various interesting things about it. Firstly, this wasn’t in the Foreign Office. This was in the Commonwealth Relations Office. AW: The offices hadn’t merged at that point? SW: They merged in November of that year and it was late September when I started there and the merger took place into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But of course it was a drawn out process and you were still very conscious of the fact, even after the merger, that the department I was working in and the departments around us were “from the Commonwealth Office” rather than from the Foreign Office. It had a function that no longer exists today. It was trying to respond to the consequences of UDI by Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, in which Britain was very much in the lead on the international response. And on the national response, it was a big political issue. And there was a UN Sanctions Regime for which support needed to be maintained. There was a great deal of political interest. AW: Who was fronting that? Who was your boss? 4 SW: I was in a team of three people lead by a First Secretary, James Allen. He was a very good trainer and a very good coach. The Head of Department was a man called Richard Faber who was a bit more remote from me; he was an old school Commonwealth Relations person from the Faber publishing family. The Under Secretary was a very grand figure called Jim Bottomley who was the father of Peter Bottomley the current MP. The work in that first year was principally about getting to know how to do things. How to manage parliamentary business, how to prepare Ministers, so the process you had to learn was important and the point of the first year’s work. I found the subject matter very absorbing, quite challenging, a lot of public correspondence, a lot of parliamentary questions, and the challenge from the opposition party and from the public of the Government’s policies. During my time, and this was only one year, there were two rounds of high level talks with the Smith regime which were prepared at top level and the Prime Minister was involved. I was part of the team who were preparing the briefing materials for both those rounds of talks, both named after the Royal Navy ships on which they took place, the Tiger and the Fearless talks. They were not conclusive but were an important part of the process. There was public correspondence, responding to letters from the public both directly to the FCO or to MPs or to other Ministers, all of which came onto our desk. There was a lot of it and I learned how to get as close as possible to answering the question because I thought, and nobody sought to dissuade me, that the public were entitled to proper answers but in line with Government policy. There were some particular exercises, the new entrant (and they had a new entrant every year in this role) was always given the task of organising the Governor’s Christmas cards. The Governor of Rhodesia was not part of the illegal regime, he was still loyal to The Queen and the UK and was the only remaining part of the UK Government actually in Rhodesia. He needed support in all sorts of ways and every year he wanted to send Christmas cards which were best bought and supplied from the UK which was a normal process for any other post. But to supply Christmas cards to Rhodesia was technically, on the face of it, a violation of UN sanctions. So permission had to be obtained through the proper channels and this was very much a Civil Service classic exercise to ask the new entrant to get it through, to look at the file and see how it was done last year, do it again, deal with anything that had changed during the year and of course get the cards delivered in time for the Governor to send them out. Happily I navigated all of that. 5 I think my best memory from that year’s work in the department was being asked to draft a speech for the Lord Chancellor to open a debate in the House of Lords, in those days the Lord Chancellor was the Speaker.