There is a new French ambassador arriving in London this week. He is Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, known as — what else? — MGM in Quai d’Orsay. It is fashionable to downplay the role of the ambassador in the modern world. Has not instant communication made the profession of diplomacy redundant? When the president of France and the prime minister of the United Kingdom see each other at EU, G8 or other meetings with more regularity than they talk to their ministers, who needs ambassadors? Moreover, with so much of the common business between France and Britain conducted at European level, surely it is in Brussels, not London and Paris, that problems between the two countries are resolved?
Nothing could be further from the truth. The state continues to incarnate the will, identity and ambition of the nation. The nation and its state has the sovereign power to take life by sending its soldiers to die. It takes our money through taxes. It decides the rules by which we express our sexuality, get help when ill, and whether a young woman can ‘manifest her religion’ (to quote the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights) by wearing the Muslim veil at school as well as in the street — permitted by the British state but forbidden by French law. The nation and its state decides if abortion is illegal, as in Poland and Ireland, and what speed we can drive our cars — limited in France and Britain but without any controls on the autobahnen of Germany.
So what the British and French nations do via their states is of the highest importance for their citizens and for their mutual relationship. An ambassador has the high duty to represent the authority and power of the state and the nation in a foreign country. Despite the EU, despite the hundreds of thousands of French in Britain and British in France, the two countries are foreign to each other. Gordon Brown has no French. President Sarkozy has little English. Good ambassadors in Paris and London can be mutual interpreters so that the two states, as represented by their respective chiefs, can understand each other.
Being an ambassador of France in London will be to live with the eternal curse of the essential Anglo-French question: do we like each other? Can we work together? One view is that of the 19th-century British foreign secretary George Canning, who said that French governments ‘have but two rules of action; to thwart us whenever they know our object, and when they know it not, to imagine one for us, and set about to thwarting that’.
Contrast this with the view of Duff Cooper, the close friend and ally of Winston Churchill who resigned as Britain’s minister of war in 1938 rather than share the dishonour of Chamberlain and Daladier over Munich. In 1944, Cooper was sent by Churchill to be ambassador in Paris. Cooper hoped, he wrote later, ‘for closer relations between the two countries [France and the United Kingdom], with integration as the final aim, and that the solidarity of this north-west corner of France might become the nucleus of a great international combine, larger and more powerful than the Soviet Union or the United States’.
Alas, there are too many in London who believe that France exists only to thwart Britain. And Paris throngs with those in high places for whom les Anglo-Saxons are the eternal foe. The European Union cannot substitute itself — even if this were desirable — for the desire and will of its great member states to co-operate. That requires national leadership.
So the ambassador of a great nation like France is more than the postman of Paris. He can play a vital role in building trust. He has to persuade an audience far beyond that of his fellow professional diplomats serving Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary that if Britain and France can find a common purpose, a common voice and a common vision then the two countries can do important things with and for Europe.
France has been well served by its recent ambassadors in London. Britain, in turn, has sent only its finest diplomats to serve in Paris. The present British ambassador in Paris, Sir Peter Westmacott, arrived from Turkey, where more than anyone in Ankara he had built bridges between the democratic Islamist government in Turkey and Europe. Now his job is to convert the Turkophobe French towards the view that a Turkey working towards a European destination is better than an isolated Turkey seeing and hearing only cold words and looks from the EU.
The Prime Minister notoriously preferred not to stay with ambassadors in his international trips when Chancellor. After the disaster of the gossipy memoirs of the former ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, with his sneers at John Prescott and other Labour ministers who did not meet his snobby standards, Brown may feel he made a wise choice. But the desire to serve the state and see their country walk tall is in the DNA of every British ambassador I have met. Save in a handful of top embassies, it is a lonely job. Endless staff cuts are imposed as Britain’s overseas spending goes to development aid, the intelligence agencies and defence — anything other than political networking, making friends and influencing government by high-quality diplomacy.
A good ambassador can make a big difference. The new French one was at President Chirac’s side during all the ups and downs on Atlantic and European relations in recent years. That he has been sent to London shows that France takes us seriously. Can we repay the compliment? It is up to the diplomatic services of both nations to show that their talents and artistry remain relevant and needed in the modern age of relations between nations and their states.