Whatever happened to Sir Richard Evans?

I had read — admittedly in the Guardian — that one needed to count one’s fingers after shaking hands with Dick Evans. Anecdotes about the super-salesman who secured UK plc’s biggest and most controversial contract, the $80 billion Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis that saved British Aerospace (now BAE Systems), suggested a crafty Lancastrian who has despots for breakfast, or at least to breakfast, while separating them from their defence budgets. In his 37 years at BAE and its state-owned predecessors, Sir Richard Evans — the knighthood came in John Major’s last year in office — built a prodigious contact book of warriors from Pretoria to Peoria, while staring down a succession of British campaigners and journalists who alleged corruption in BAE’s dealings under his watch. It’s said that his Saudi deal-clincher, by the way, was his banquet party-trick of swallowing sheep’s eyes as though they were cocktail canapés.