Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360-378)
SIR CHRISTOPHER
MEYER KCMG
19 APRIL 2006
Q360 Mr Purchase: She was the second
Margaret Thatcher, by the way.
Sir Christopher Meyer: You have
put me off my stroke now!
Q361 Andrew Mackinlay: You were saying
it was a model relationship.
Sir Christopher Meyer: What I
am saying is that when things came up in the relationship which
were important to the United Kingdom and which the Americans were
resisting or if there was a danger that we were going to be taken
for granted, if she was in Washington she would storm into the
Oval Office and beat him around the head with her handbag or get
on the phone, as after Grenada, and really give him hell, and
we won important tricks there: Laker Airways, the Siberian pipeline,
pulling Reagan back on nuclear arms control after the Reykjavik
Summit, a whole bunch of stuff where that kind of really hard-nosed
negotiating paid off without damaging the closeness and intimacy
of the relationship. What we have had over the last few years
is a great closeness and intimacy in the personal and political
relationship between the Prime Minister and first Clinton and
then Bush, but the other bit of the Thatcher equation has been
missing. On things like the ITAR waiver, where you have massive
bureaucratic institutional resistance in the State Department
more than in the Department of Defense, it requires a huge push
from the other side to try and shift this, plus intensive working
up on the Hill. We could say the same thing for the steel tariffs
which were imposed just at the time when several thousand Royal
Marines were arriving in Afghanistan—an absolute disgrace
that this should have happened. There were strong domestic American
political reasons for doing it, but we should have been able to
put a stronger counterbalance into that argument. There was the
Air Services Agreement where even getting antitrust immunity for
code sharing between British Airways and American Airlines we
could not get through. Part of the reason for that was that there
was not enough velocity and not enough steam coming out of London
to counterbalance the very powerful economic interests which were
trying to stop us. I love the Americans but they do have this
wonderful characteristic of being very sincere and genuine and
emotional even about the support we give them, and they mean it,
but in this part of the woods when you are doing the hard business
they are as hard as nails. We used to be like that in the 19th
century. That is why the French called us perfide Albion,
which as far as I am concerned is a badge of honour actually.
We have rather lost this ability to really go in hard and not
worry that we are going to damage the relationship. We will not
damage the relationship.
Q362 Mr Maples: You are quite critical
in your book in two or three places. You talk about, with this
list of things, there being no clear vision of the national interest,
that there needs to be a plain-speaking conversation between the
President and the Prime Minister, that the hard and dull detail
of negotiation is uncongenial to Tony Blair. You seem to be saying
that the only way to solve some of these difficult issues is at
the absolutely top level between the President and the Prime Minister
and that we just did not do that.
Sir Christopher Meyer: That is
true. Sometimes it is quite hard over here to grasp the kinds
of issues that get stuck in the White House. On the ridiculous
issue of the banana war between the Europeans and the Americans,
I found it quite difficult in London to persuade people that bananas
had got into the White House, so to say, and that they were only
going to be dealt with in a satisfactory way by raising it to
the level of Downing Street and the White House. I had another
thing which has gone right out of my head. Just repeat the question
please.
Q363 Mr Maples: You were saying,
some of this long shopping list has to be dealt with at absolutely
the highest level and several times in your book you are quite
critical of the Prime Minister for either not taking opportunities,
not seeing what needs to be done, not having an agenda which is—
Sir Christopher Meyer: The national
interest, yes. The only observation I would make on that is that
the Americans, like the Chinese, like the Russians, have a very
hard-headed view of the national interest. There may be a lot
of religious rhetoric around it and messianic, democratic talk.
I have just had an email from a very close friend who was a very
senior official in the last years of the administration talking
about "greetings from the theocracy", but inside of
that there is a very hard-nosed attitude to the national interest,
a very clear view. There is no mucking around with concepts of
the post-modern state and all that sort of flim-flam. I think
that is something that we have lost over here, where it is almost
indecent, almost politically incorrect now, to talk about the
national interest, however you define it. I was quite struck by
reading Tony Blair's speech, the first of that sequence of three
which I think he is making on foreign affairs, where he counter-poses
an agreed set of global values on the one hand against national
interests which at different points in the speech are described
as narrow or immediate or old-fashioned. I think the trick is
to go for your global values; I have no objection to that, but
inside it you have got to be crystal clear about national interest,
that as long as heads of state and government respond to national
parliaments and national electorates it is not going to go away.
Q364 Mr Maples: Whatever the global
picture is going to be, the multinational, multilateral picture,
there are always going to be some bilateral issues which affect
only the two countries and can only be settled between them. It
seems to many of us, whether you regard the Iraq war as right
or wrong, whether you regard Britain's wholesale commitment to
supporting the United States as right or wrong, that we have frankly
got absolutely nothing in return. Not only did we not get the
items we have just talked about on the shopping list, and I am
sure you could enumerate a lot longer list than I can, we did
not really seem to get much of a role in the post-war planning
or listened to in that either. It seems to me, recognising this
very tough national interest that you are up against and the problems
between the two governments, or the one and a half governments
in the United States, that whoever is the Prime Minister of Britain
has got to realise that they are only going to resolve these things
by extracting them. It is like pulling teeth. These are going
to be difficult concessions to extract and the time to do it is
when you are about to give them something that they want.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I would
agree with that entirely. It is something which is almost wholly
missing from what is in other respects the quite admirable latest
Foreign Office strategy paper which does not talk about that at
all.
Q365 Ms Stuart: Sir Christopher,
I have not read your book closely enough to know whether we are
all pygmies or whether the description was just over the part
of the politicians but I am glad you talked to us anyway.
Sir Christopher Meyer: It was
a faint-made metaphor floating up in the air.
Q366 Ms Stuart: Can I take you back
to the days when you were an ambassador in Washington and when
the Foreign Affairs Committee visited you because, just listening
to John Maples, something occurred to me? I think you are quite
right that Britain ought to be firmer in its expression of national
interest. I do not entirely agree that all that is lacking is
a handbag which needs to be wielded at regular intervals. Would
there not be a point in Her Majesty's ambassadors, when things
like the Foreign Affairs Committee come, giving the committee
an indication that you probably thought might be helpful, because
if that is helpful we could come back and actually say, "Dear
Government, we actually think you've got it wrong", whereas
whenever we go anywhere we are told it is all absolutely wonderful.
I do recall very clearly being told by you how absolutely wonderful
it all was.
Sir Christopher Meyer: The trouble
is I cannot remember. I may well have been having one of those
polyannish moods, to use an American phrase, but if you had come—no;
I think that there could be—did I not go on about air services
and steel tariffs?
Q367 Ms Stuart: No. I have a very
clear memory of the debriefing because it was following the Blair/Bush
meeting.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Which one?
The first one?
Q368 Ms Stuart: I just remember what
was eaten at great length and how long it took for the second
and the third course to arrive but I have no recollection whatsoever
of what anybody said of any substance.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Did I talk
about food?
Q369 Ms Stuart: Yes.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I must
have been out of my mind.
Q370 Ms Stuart: It must have been
a bad day.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I tell
you what: if you came after the very first Bush/Blair meeting
in February 2001, the opening one, we were all a bit euphoric
by then because the meeting had gone terribly well. There was
not a lot of substance to the meeting, to be perfectly frank,
that very first one.
Q371 Andrew Mackinlay: It was a corporate
meeting, I think, we claimed afterwards.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Was it
the first one?
Q372 Mr Pope: It was the spring of
2003.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I was not
there in the spring of 2003. No wonder I was—that was David
Manning.
Q373 Ms Stuart: I can tell the difference,
even without my glasses. There is a serious point to this, and
the very serious point is that you are sitting here as an ex-member
of the Diplomatic Service, you are looking back and some things
clearly have not worked out the way they should have. If there
was a way in which the mechanisms, like toughening-up actions,
could be looked at so that we could act a little bit more positively
if we changed some things, what would you do differently?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I must
say I did think that when your committee came out to Washington
while I was there I did talk about not only the wonderful meals
but also the pebbles in our shoes. I thought I did talk about
the air services. I certainly was sufficiently steamed up about
steel tariffs in about February 2002 to talk about them, and I
did think I was talking to people about the ITAR waiver and the
real difficulty we had in getting licences for the export of American
military technologies in the UK.
Q374 Ms Stuart: Is that your chief
accusation, that this Prime Minister is not handbagging as much
as Thatcher did and that is what got her the goods? That certainly
never came across, that you needed a greater steely determination
at the top.
Sir Christopher Meyer: No, and,
to be fair, this was not just handbags where Thatcher was concerned.
It was an attitude that pervaded the whole government machine,
as it should do. Again, I am not going to say that Tony Blair
was the only reason that we did not get steel tariffs stopped,
because I know perfectly well that Patricia Hewitt, when she was
Trade and Industry Secretary, tried pretty hard as well, but it
is something where you need all hands to the pump from the Prime
Minister downwards, to the Foreign Secretary, to the functional
Secretary of State, and above all in the bureaucracy of the Foreign
Office. It is an attitude of mind that national interest matters,
and I did not express myself in those terms when you came, I know
that, but I think I did mention the problems.
Q375 Sandra Osborne: Can you tell
me if, during your time at the Foreign Office or in Washington,
you saw any evidence of the policy of extraordinary rendition?
Sir Christopher Meyer: None whatsoever,
no. I did not know anything about that at all.
Q376 Sandra Osborne: So you would
not be aware of any British complicity in it?
Sir Christopher Meyer: No. I think
all that happened later. Guantanamo had been set up while I was
there and we were able to get somebody from the embassy down to
Guantanamo a couple of times before I left, but extraordinary
rendition and all that has been something that has blown up long
after I retired.
Q377 Sandra Osborne: On Guantanamo
the British Government have been criticised for not publicly opposing
Guantanamo or criticising it as strongly as they could do. Do
you think that is a fair criticism?
Sir Christopher Meyer: When I
was Ambassador this was, if you like, in the first flush of all
this stuff. Guantanamo had just been set up. We had just dealt
with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it was pretty
early days. Now, of course, the Government talks about it being
an anomaly, I think is the euphemism it uses. My personal view
now is that you cannot go on indefinitely without introducing
some due process for the people held there. I am not quite sure
what I mean by that. Just as in Northern Ireland for a time we
used the Diplock courts because of the difficulties of holding
trials in a conventional way, it cannot be beyond the wit of man
to come up with something similar which would at least allow those
held in Guantanamo to be submitted to some kind of due process.
Whereas in the early days I could understand it perfectly well,
now, five years on, it is a different period.
Q378 Sandra Osborne: So are you saying
that because it was early days it could almost be justified? In
private was the British Government critical of the policy? Did
they question it or were they in agreement with it?
Sir Christopher Meyer: They did
not question it while I was there.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We have
covered a very wide range of areas. We would like to thank you,
Sir Christopher, for your time and for coming along today.
| 
