Mike Maclay on The Thrill of Diplomacy

Your first book?

It’s called The Laughing Diplomat by Daniele Varè, who was an Italian diplomat in the 1920s and 30s. I got it from my grandmother as a jeune diplomat, and it seemed to be a crummy second-hand bookshop number that should be off to Oxfam. But it was a fascinating book! Because what Varè captures is the excitement of representation, and the elegance of it as a profession in those days, from a time when diplomacy was glamorous. However, there’s more to it than that. First the title – diplomats don't laugh, they smile. There’s a wonderful line in one of Douglas Hurd’s novels about the English as a people of thin smiles, and English diplomats have very thin smiles. So the idea of a laughing diplomat was rather a counterintuitive one. And this particular chap managed to have fun: he had a great appetite for the good things of diplomacy, had some pretty interesting times, and he wrote them up brilliantly.

Who was Varè?

He worked his way up through the ministry and was posted in China, Siberia, and around Europe – Vienna, Geneva – a lot of the old capitals. They gave him quite a good career, and along the way there are scenes of romance, intense political manoeuvring, and ‘grandeur and decadence’. But of course the sinister undertone is that he was increasingly representing a fascist dictatorship, and ultimately there had to be a disjuncture between the honourable way in which he represented his country – the very stylised nature of the exchanges he would take part in – and the thuggishness of the system he was there to represent.

Eventually it had to break, but the book as a result carries this wonderful feeling of, you know, the clichéd line about diplomats being ‘honest men sent abroad to lie for their country’ – he wasn’t lying, he was doing the best within the system to say what was true, but eventually the cord snapped. It’s a first person account both of the colour of being a diplomat, but then also making the point that what you’re representing is ultimately more important than how you represent it.

Can you forgive him for representing Fascism?

Yes – the early chapters are the ones one can most readily identify with: for his delight in the sheer beauty of the countries he represented Italy in, and the trips he did, the stimulating artistic and cultural figures he met. He had – before we get to the bedrock of representing a rotten regime – an understanding of what diplomacy is about. There’s a lovely line of his: ‘Diplomacy is not like football – instead of trying to win you also have to try and convince the other side that they won’. And that was something that drew me to diplomacy at the outset. Another way of putting it is: ‘The art of letting someone else have your way.’ There’s a modern dimension to his insights, in that diplomacy at its best is about giving the other side a way out, and, even when you’ve trounced them, giving them the feeling that they’ve actually done quite well out of this – not irrelevant to current political developments in the UK.

What is Peacemakers about?

It was published in 2001 and written by Margaret Macmillan, and this is the book that made her, because she took a fresh look at the Versailles Treaty – about which we thought we already knew enough. Where The Laughing Diplomat was very much about the diplomatic lifestyle, here is the high policy: here are those compromises that have to be made between nations, which can be disastrous in their outcome or, in a more unexpected way, can actually do some good. And the beautiful story she tells is how men of goodwill did try to make the Second World War impossible. The Italians, the Chinese and the Japanese put in brief appearances, but it’s mainly about the clash of these three great men – Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson, and the Germans playing their part as best they could. Individually, she takes you through their motivations, their style of operating, and their attempts to get things right.

Does she see the failure to prevent the war as being theirs?

Next book?

The Search for Peace by Douglas Hurd, who was UK Foreign Secretary for seven years from 1989, just after the fall of the Wall. He wrote it soon after stepping down. It’s a fine book, which for its day was quite comprehensive and authoritative. It’s a bit of a modern primer, which explains the techniques of bilateral diplomacy as well as multilateral diplomacy, and really deals with the failures and successes of the last century. The emotional heart of the book comes from his dedication to his own uncle, who was called Douglas Hurd, and died on the Somme. And the spirit informing the book is that, ultimately, the diplomats have to find ways of heading off those worst outcomes.

The other interesting aspect is that even after ten years it shows its age, because it was written at the high watermark of what people now describe as liberal interventionism – Blair’s and Clinton’s wars. He tells the story, over the best part of 100 years, of how non-intervention as such is not really a strategy.