Thatcher’s relationship with the FCO is famously tempestuous, but Wright’s account of her toxic interactions with the indecisive and nit-picking Geoffrey Howe makes more recent PM/Foreign Secretary spats look tame. She likes ambassadors, especially those who are tall, unbearded and handsome. But she finds the FCO itself unimaginative, obsessed by compromise, and lacking in ideas − a view echoed privately by at least three subsequent PMs. She constantly overturns Wright’s carefully laid plans for ambassadorial appointments. 

 

Charles Powell, Thatcher’s beloved private secretary for foreign affairs, looms largest over the memoirs. As he accumulates power, his instructions to the FCO become more acerbic and brutal, and his Conservative leanings more obvious. He even − gasp − appears in photos with the PM. The mandarins try to pack him off to Switzerland, then Madrid. The Cabinet Secretary nearly resigns when that fails, and Wright is convinced that this fight with Thatcher − they spend an hour on it with her at one point in 1989 − is the final nail in Howe’s coffin. Wright fights off plans for a No 10 foreign affairs unit, a model that was to re-emerge under Blair. In my experience, leaders arrive in No 10 planning to delegate foreign policy, but end up centralizing. 

 

The Wright era is more Yes, Prime Minister than The Thick Of It. But more recent PUSs will recognize the churn and turf battles; the trench warfare with No 10 over policy, and with the Treasury over resources; insecurity, fanned constantly by the media, over the Special Relationship; ambassadors going AWOL or getting kidnapped; scraps over grand residences (though Thatcher was pro); suffocating paperwork; junior ministers fretting over the relative sizes of their offices, portfolios and column inches; perennial leak inquiries; parliamentary grillings over expensive IT failures; pesky media stories about FCO pointlessness; and overstretch. Recent PUSs might also recognize his worries over lack of process around Iraq decisions − Thatcher’s sofa got as much use as Blair’s. 

 

There are successes along the way. Wright is allowed to refurbish the FCO after Douglas Hurd’s ceiling collapses. He is able to persuade the satirical TV show Spitting Image to drop an Ayatollah Khomeini puppet, and kills off the proposal for a Europe Minister. But he can’t help but feel that the status of the PUS is in decline. Predecessors accompanied monarchs on their overseas trips, but he only travels with the Foreign Secretary (no longer the case). Access to the PM starts to dry up, bar the occasional scolding. Resources get scarcer, and Wright notes that his budget is the equivalent of Wandsworth Council − something more recent PUSs would dream of. 

 

Diversity is the most striking difference. Wright was PUS just over a decade after the FCO had lifted its ban on married women. Elspeth Howe, wife of the foreign secretary and a powerful advocate for equal opportunities, and the Foreign Office minister Lynda Chalker fight valiantly to get more women in senior roles, but with limited success. 

 

Meanwhile, Wright starts the process of dropping the appalling discrimination against homosexual diplomats. He and Major are sad to ‘leave a career in tatters’ when a 38-year-old officer reveals he is gay. The story is more poignant in the light of Sir Stephen Wall’s recent interview about the challenges of being a closet homosexual in the FCO of this era. Wall was Major’s private secretary at the time. Happily today Britain has a growing number of homosexual ambassadors, and the rainbow flag has flown over the FCO. 

 

What lessons could the FCO of tomorrow draw? Perhaps most importantly, Britain’s decline should not be assumed – Wright bets in 1987 that we won’t last another decade on the UN Security Council. The enemies of the early 90s were easier to find on a map or kill in a Bond film. But Wright offers a timely reminder of the need to step back from the press of the immediate. He captures a debilitating sense of neediness, with diplomats constantly searching for titbits of positive feedback from the PM or the press. He rightly decries the idea that foreign policy is about woolly and meaningless ‘good relations’. Perhaps the FCO can cultivate the French dash he envies, and get better at calculated risk, execution of policy and accountability, including for mistakes − Thatcher complains that ‘you never accept you might have got it wrong’. Maybe she was right about the need for more imagination and ideas − the answer to global challenges is rarely an international conference.

 

What diplomacy represented in Wright’s era − states, hierarchies, authority − is becoming weaker. And the challenges it confronts are becoming greater − look at the sabotaging of the US State Department. Yet the implications of diplomatic failure are more ominous than ever, and digital technology will make it harder to retain the trust of those diplomats present, and will create new scrutiny of what they do. So the FCO needs to retain the magnetic sense of collective purpose that inspired Wright – it has committed public servants and a global network that are the envy of most diplomatic services, and a national brand high in the league table for two essential 21st century strengths: creativity and soft power. But that network is stretched, and it is working hard to become less male and pale. 

 

Wright’s diaries will entertain and challenge a new generation of diplomats. For him the key to diplomacy is common sense. These memoirs add a sense that it can also be glorious fun.