Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

In this entertaining and engaging memoir, former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world.

In 1977, fresh-faced Oxford graduate Sherard Cowper-Coles entered the hallowed portals of the Foreign Office. Over the next thirty years he was invariably to be found at the frontline of international diplomacy, either striding the corridors of power at Westminster or jetting from one exotic location to the next. His tasks ranged from the challenging to the bizarre – from speech writing for Margaret Thatcher (who scrawled an emphatic ‘NO!’ over his first effort), to hiding an embarrassing bobble hat from Robin Cook .

With recollections from the last three decades in international politics, taking us right up to Cowper-Coles’s posting to Afghanistan, ‘Ever the Diplomat’ is a revealing and witty account of a unique period in our history. Cowper-Coles reveals what went on behind-the-scenes of Whitehall as we encounter a swindler impersonating Liberian President Charles Taylor, the young, idealistic leader of Syria Bashar al-Assad and Tony Blair in his boxer shorts.