Nicko Henderson, who died this week, wrote a famous dispatch when he retired as Ambassador to Paris in March 1979. It summed up how Britain’s precipitous economic decline had undermined her foreign policy, and looked for a solution in being ‘fully and inevitably committed to Europe’. We needed ‘something to stimulate a national sense of purpose’, he said. In the dispatch, Henderson recognised that he had gone ‘beyond the limits of an Ambassador’s normal responsibilities’, but thought it was his duty to do so: ‘The tailored reporting from Berlin in the late ’30s and the encouragement it gave to the policy of appeasement is a study in scarlet for every postwar diplomat.’ The dispatch was leaked to the Economist and caused a furore, but the tradition that ambassadors wrote dispatches when they arrived in and when they left a posting survived until 2006. Then Sir Ivor Roberts, retiring from Rome, used his dispatch to lash out at the ‘bullshit bingo’ management culture of Tony Blair’s Foreign Office. As if to prove Sir Ivor’s point, the dispatches were then abolished. This is a loss. They were considered documents. They were often wrong, of course, but they performed the necessary function of achieving perspective, were instructive for successors, and make fascinating historical documents. One reason we are so badly governed now is that the institutions of government have abolished their own memory and independence of mind.
Although she never agreed with him about Europe, Margaret Thatcher rewarded Henderson despite — or because of — his frankness, and brought him out of retirement to become Ambassador in Washington. In that post he became part of the recovery of ‘a national sense of purpose’ which he sought, but in a way he could never have foreseen, by his genuinely brilliant diplomacy during the Falklands war.
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