Colossal windbags

‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the same time there’s a weird sense that they were all written by the same person — someone peering down a very long nose beneath which lies an indulgently curled lip.

In 1962, Sir John Russell, the then ambassador to Brazil, writes that his plane had to make an unscheduled stop in a place called Belem. ‘The usual scruffy Brazilian airport,’ he notes. ‘But delicious hot fried crabs in the buffet, washed down with an appalling white cane-alcohol of a truly industrial proof.’

Twenty years on, Sir Alan Donald, ambassador to Indonesia, addresses the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, on the general election campaign.