Customer Reviews

DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain's Ambassador to the U.S. at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War

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Sir Christopher Meyer resigned as British ambassador in Washington just before the start of hostilities in Iraq. He has started a new career as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, but his frequent appearances on television since he left the diplomatic service have been almost exclusively in connexion with his privileged insights into the origins of the war. The title of the book is a slight misnomer - most of it is indeed about his time as ambassador to the USA, but the first few chapters are partly concerned with his early life and career and partly with a personal issue that burns him up, namely his second wife's grisly experiences with German justice in obtaining access to her children from her first marriage.

In Britain the book has given rise to a good deal of comment for supposedly disparaging or even attacking prominent politicians, and I noticed that he had to appear before a parliamentary committee to respond to such points. These allegations are simply balderdash, and the politicians concerned have no business being so thin skinned in my own opinion. John Prescott's malapropisms are the stuff of legend, and the ones that Meyer records are not only relevant but vintage efforts too. They make Prescott look ridiculous, but nowhere near as ridiculous as his own over-reaction did. In any case Meyer's overall assessment of Prescott is fair and far from unfavourable, and he is not afraid to tell a similar story about himself - after three years of shuffling along presentation-lines he was overcome with a kind of catatonic amnesia, forgot his wife's name and introduced her to the puzzled grandees by various alternatives including `Christopher'. As for the other seemingly contentious matters, I find it difficult to imagine that even Jack Straw himself supposes he has very many groupies, and to find anything sensational about an account of seeing John Major partly dressed sets the qualifying-bar for sensation as low as I can ever recall. In fact the book seems to me conspicuously fair-minded in general. A British civil servant is required to be professionally neutral, but even when I knew him 40 years ago I never recall Christopher showing any particular political inclination. He has a strong streak of irreverence, but he is not a committed scoffer either. He has a fairly traditional sense of awe in respect of Churchill for instance, he was obviously impressed with Mrs Thatcher, and Blair's strongest opponents would be hard put to it to deny that he is what Meyer finds him to be - a bit of a genius in some ways.

The style of writing is light and informal, at least until we get to the really serious chapter entitled `War'. It is entirely free of the portentousness that one tends to associate with Whitehall mandarins called Sir Hector this and Sir Herbert that, but there was a time when no senior civil servant would have used `aftermath' to mean after-effect or `cataclysmic' to mean disastrous, just as there was a time when no eminent publishing house would have put a full stop in the name Harry S Truman. The early chapters are interesting in their own right, and the author comes across basically as the man I used to know all those decades ago, even looking 20 years younger than he is. I'm in no position to form an opinion about the clearly distressing issue of his wife's treatment by the German legal process, apparently supported by its British counterpart. Everyone seems to be wrong except Catherine, but for all I know that may be the truth of it. When it comes to the medical problem that he discloses near the end of the book, all I can do is to offer him my sincerest wishes for a full and speedy recovery.

The climactic section of the book is obviously the build-up to war in Iraq. Whatever one thinks of the ambassador's conclusions, this is an account such as nobody else could have given. This is the full-dress professional writing now, and the style changes noticeably. He sees reason to suspect that future historians will not deal very kindly with Bush and Blair over the issue, but however that turns out future historians will have a document to work on that they had no right to expect. Far from attacking the politicians I feel that Christopher gives them a good deal too much benefit of a good deal too much doubt. Be that as it may, he presents his evidence and his reasoning with scrupulous fairness and admirable clarity. He sees Blair as being convinced of the case for pre-emptive action before Bush was, he does not buy the usual caricature of Bush (nor do I), and he finds against allegations that war was decided on from the outset and the rest was lies. He fairly obviously believes that Blair's basic analysis is right but that the war was botched through haste. He was there and I wasn't, of course, but I wonder whether he has also - like the Blairs as he rightly says - been seduced by the proximity and glamour of America, to which he was a latecomer. Blair's stories about the WMD's take some explaining away, and it surely will not do to say that all the Washington hawks sincerely believed that Saddam was implicated in 9/11. What does `sincere' mean in this context? To me it means that they were letting their passions run away with their brains: a moment's rational reflection would surely have told anyone that Saddam was not likely to give assistance to an organisation that liked him little better than it liked America and that would give him problems he didn't need at a time when he didn't need them. I also wonder how this `sincerity' squares with the suspicion, stated some chapters earlier, that the attack on Iraq was displacement activity - Al Qaeda were elusive, so bomb someone and be perceived to be `doing something'. That is a view that seems more than persuasive to me.

This is the main section of the book, but there is a lot more to it, and the author's mindset makes his way of telling it all illuminating as well as highly readable. The squawks of outrage seem to have died down and I hope he took no notice of them. If Christopher has anything more to say on the Iraq war between adjudicating on press complaints, I shall be more than interested to hear it.

This book has two strong points to recommend it.

First, with the poor quality and lack of depth in modern news reporting you don't know the story until the books come out.

Second, this book is written by a Briton who was closely associated with the Blair and Bush governments while the decision were being made regarding the war in Iraq. This is important because as a non-American Mr. Meyer doesn't have his own political axe to grind. He is neither a Bush hater nor a Bush lover who thinks that Bush can do no wrong.

One critical issue that he addresses is the decision to invade Iraq. Most of the Bush haters seem to believe that the president came to office with the intent of a war in Iraq. Mr. Meyer says no, but the details are too complex to list in a short review like this one.

All in all, this is a most interesting book that presents an outside view of the American presidential seen. It is well written, a fairly easy read, and seems fairly balanced.

An interesting insight into to the world of diplomacy and politics. Christopher Meyer's biting yet diplomatic comments on the behaviour of our leading politicians and their accolites, including our own Prime Minister and the President of USA, proved an absorbing read which I found difficult to put down!