Collateral Damage

2

Off and Then On Again

*

‘I think the PM has other plans for Washington’

– Jeremy Heywood, cabinet secretary

*

IT WAS July 2015. I was coming to the end of my four years as national security adviser. David Cameron had just won a surprise election victory. Change was in the Whitehall air. One of my outer office team telephoned me. ‘Jeremy’s office just rang. Can you pop down?’ I guessed immediately that the summons from Jeremy Heywood, as cabinet secretary the most senior civil servant in the country, could be about a move; or possibly just an exit. There was no guarantee of another job after the national security post.

I was at Jeremy’s door in thirty seconds. As I had anticipated, he got straight to the point: ‘Have you thought about what you want to do next?’ I had of course thought long and hard about precisely that question, and had reached a simple conclusion. It was arguably my time to move to the private sector; but there was one job which would keep me in the public service. ‘I’d like to go to Washington,’ I said. ‘And the timing fits: Peter Westmacott will have done his four years at the end of this year.’ Jeremy looked as if he had expected this, and came straight back with: ‘I think the Prime Minister has other plans for Washington.’

I, in turn, wasn’t surprised. If another civil servant had been ahead of me for the post, I would, after my time as national security adviser, have been disappointed. But I guessed there might be a political figure in the wings: Washington was a job which had often gone to political appointees. Indeed, as a junior press spokesman in the Foreign Office back in the 1970s, I’d had to defend then Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s appointment of his son-in-law, Peter Jay, to Washington. I could still remember the witty newspaper headline: ‘The son-in-law also rises’.

Jeremy asked whether I would be interested in other roles. I said that I felt I had done enough time in Whitehall; and the job I had just completed had represented the summit of my ambitions, were Washington not an option. Jeremy asked what I would do. I said I would try my luck outside government. We left it at that.

As I retreated to my office, I was grateful to Jeremy for his frankness. He was one of the finest civil servants I had known; and he had been a friend, an ally and an invaluable source of advice throughout my time as national security adviser. His death of cancer in 2018, tragically young, remains a huge loss to the country. As for the possibility of a political appointee to Washington, I was philosophical. The Prime Minister had a perfect right to do so, given the pre-eminent importance of the relationship between the UK and the US. Anyway, the private sector would be interesting; if rumour was correct, less work for (much) more money.

I broke the news to Vanessa that evening. She was similarly philosophical, knowing that, in a diplomatic career, nothing was for sure until you got on the plane. She had learnt this early, through the protracted saga of my first posting, back in 1980. In practice, in those days, you went where you were sent. But in theory, you could express preferences. So we spent an evening choosing our top three preferences from the list of jobs available, and the three we wanted to avoid. It was with some trepidation, then, that I went home one evening and told her: ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is: I’ve got a posting. The bad news is that it’s Lagos, one of our bottom three!’

But that was just the start. One of the periodic Foreign Office economy drives led to the Lagos job being cut. So the FO’s Plan B was that I should go to The Hague. I even took a couple of Dutch lessons, from which I remember the phrase Der tafellaken is helder wit: ‘the tablecloth is bright white’. It didn’t seem to me the most useful observation, but perhaps I hadn’t attended enough diplomatic dinners. In any case, my efforts at Dutch were wasted when the FO decided to keep the incumbent on in post for another year. So I waited another few weeks, to be told I was going to Tokyo at a month’s notice. As it turned out, Tokyo was a fabulous posting, where we made friendships that have lasted to this day. And from that episode on, we knew that the unexpected was to be expected. We grew to treasure the unpredictability of diplomatic life.

Two days passed. For the first time in my life, I started to read about my pension arrangements – but found the details utterly baffling. And then, out of nowhere, a second summons to Jeremy’s office arrived.

Jeremy came straight to the point. He told me that the Prime Minister thought I had done a good job as national security adviser, and was inclined to find a way to meet my Washington ambitions. But it would only be for two, perhaps two and a half years, rather than the usual three to four. How would I feel about that?

I said immediately that I would be fine with it. A small part of me was thinking that by mid-2018 I would have done four decades in the diplomatic service and might want a change of scene. But a bigger part of me was calculating that if a week was a long time in politics, two years was an eternity: a lot could happen in that time.

A few days later, I picked up a plausible rumour about what the plan might have been. The story was that David Cameron was not going to fight the 2020 election. He was instead intending to stand down in the second half of 2018, to leave his successor a clear run in office, eighteen months before the election. And Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, would be sent to Washington when David resigned. Ed was a good friend whom I had known for close to twenty years, an accomplished and well-liked linchpin in No. 10, and a natural diplomat. So I wouldn’t have begrudged him the job for a second. In the end, however, the great roulette wheel of life took another spin, as I had guessed it might: within a year of my conversation with Jeremy, Cameron would resign and Ed would go to Paris rather than Washington. There are worse second prizes.

Washington is, in the eyes of most in the British diplomatic service, the most coveted post on the planet. So over the inevitable long celebratory dinner at our local, The Glasshouse in Kew, Vanessa and I talked about the circuitous route which was taking us to 3100 Massachusetts Avenue; and about quite how big a part luck had played in the journey. Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow – in the days when she did more films, less lifestyle – is a minor but entertaining British romcom from 1998, built around the intriguing idea of two parallel stories. In one, our Gwyneth is running for a train on the London Underground, gets distracted by a lost earring, and just misses it: the doors slide shut with her stranded on the platform. In the other, she makes it onto the train. The two stories then play out. In one scenario, life works out well; in the other, badly. It thus illustrates an eternal truth: that in everyone’s life, there are chance moments, or seemingly small decisions, which can in practice change your life irrevocably.

So what journey brought me to this point? The Darrochs are a Scottish clan, concentrated mostly on the island of Jura, off Scotland’s west coast: beautiful if you like bleak and windswept, famous for Jura whisky, the Corryvreckan whirlpool, just off the island’s northern tip, and the fact that George Orwell wrote 1984 in a farmhouse on the island whilst dying from tuberculosis (in a letter to his agent, he complained of ‘a quite unendurable winter’). But Scottish ancestry notwithstanding, I was born in South Stanley, County Durham, where my grandparents on my mother’s side lived – my grandfather was a miner. My brother, Neil, followed some twenty-two months later. I lived until the age of six in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father taught at the local expatriate school. My parents then split up and my brother and I returned to England with my father: apart from a brief visit she paid to the UK a few months later, I never saw my mother again. And as a typically inhibited, or perhaps repressed, Englishman I have never tried to track her down. I’m told she left my father after meeting someone else in Kenya – this was, after all, the Happy Valley era. Hence she stayed there and my father returned to England with my brother and me. I’m also told that somewhere, I have two half-sisters. But life has moved on.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, as might have been more usual, my brother and I had stayed with her rather than accompanying my father – the first of those life-determining sliding doors moments. I suppose I might still have gone to university. But I can’t believe I would thence have joined the Foreign Office. And to focus on the important stuff, if nothing else I would have been known as Nigel rather than Kim; the former was my mother’s choice, the latter my father’s – a lifelong Rudyard Kipling fan. And I would thereby have escaped four years in Tokyo where, until they met me, most Japanese assumed I was Korean, as in Kim Dae Ryung; and three years in Washington where, until they met me, most Americans assumed I was a woman.

On arrival back in England, my father initially got a teaching job at a school in Midhurst, Sussex, leaving my brother and me with my grandmother, who was headteacher at the village primary school in the hamlet of Farnborough in Berkshire: he would drive up to see us at weekends. Farnborough’s only claim to fame is that it is, at 720 feet above sea level, the highest village in … well, Berkshire. Perhaps that’s why the headteacher’s cottage was so cold.

It was a gentle but isolated existence, in a community dominated by farming. There was a village squire, living in what looked to me like a stately home at the top end of the village. But it was also clear, even to a child of my age, that there was a good deal of rural poverty around. And the village school was genuinely tiny; around forty pupils, of all ages from five to eleven. There were some primitive touches, such as outside lavatories, and school meals delivered daily by van, in metal containers the size and shape of milk churns. The meals were, I suspect, already overcooked by several hours before being deposited in the containers, and the subsequent van journey encouraged the process of deterioration to continue. There are things which to this day I cannot eat, among them custard and gravy, so traumatic did I find some of the contents of those churns.

There was another side to this modest village school. My grandmother was formidable: a force of nature. She had been an army teacher during the Second World War, and had been evacuated out of several locations in North Africa. The British Army had actually missed a trick; had they promoted her to field marshal, the enemy would have fled. As it was, she imposed strict discipline and an iron rule on the school, I daresay on the whole village. My brother and I always felt that she was harder on us than anyone else; no doubt she was anxious to head off accusations of favouritism.

But whatever, it worked. I did well enough academically to be entered for the scholarship exams for Abingdon School, about thirty miles away. There was a Darroch history with the school; two of my uncles had gone there, though not my father. Abingdon was at that stage a direct grant establishment (it’s now fully independent), which meant that while most pupils there were fee-paying, the local authority funded a small number of scholarship kids – of whom I turned out to be one, when I lucked through the exams. I was one of the last of the direct grant generation; the Labour government abolished the scheme in 1975, thus denying bright children from less well off backgrounds the chance to go to great schools. No doubt those responsible for the decision could justify it; but to me, to this day, it looks like an act of tribal political vandalism.

Abingdon was a mixed experience. It was a wonderful school, which has since become famous as the alma mater of Radiohead (coincidentally, I’m sure, a new music school was built in the school grounds while I was there). But I was a difficult and disruptive teenager, setting school records for the number of detentions and beatings in a single term and constantly on the edge of expulsion. A psychologist would no doubt attribute this to a broken home and an absent mother. But for me, it was much more about an instinctive and, it turned out, lifelong resistance to authority; to this day, if I am ever ‘ordered’ to do anything, as opposed to being politely asked, my inclination is to do the opposite.

I was also painfully conscious at school of being different from everyone else – in terms of where I’d come from and where I lived. When I won a scholarship, my grandmother retired from the village school, and we moved at short notice to Abingdon – with my father at that stage still visiting at weekends. As was straightforward in those days, we were assigned a first-floor flat in a council estate about fifteen minutes’ walk from the school; the British equivalent of US public housing. Abingdon School had a distinctive school uniform, and as I walked out of the estate every morning, instantly identifiable as the only Abingdonian on the estate, I imagined every curtain twitching and ambushes being hatched. The reality, though, was quite different. There were no attacks, and my brother and I ended up playing impromptu games of football with the local youths most evenings. And when my father got a job in the area, remarried and bought a house, I missed the estate.

I just about survived at Abingdon. I was one of only a handful to be given no responsibility whatever: I was made neither a school nor a house prefect. I played tennis for the school, and some rugby (though I never reached the glamour of the first XV, for which I would have traded a lot, especially since my younger brother, though at a different school, was a star rugby player). But I got some good O levels; and then, despite picking the wrong subjects for A level – Biology, Chemistry and Physics when I should have done English and History – got good enough grades to head north, to Durham University, to study Zoology. I never even considered Oxbridge.

Durham was in some ways a re-run of Abingdon. The university had a collegiate system, and I had chosen, pretty much at random, Hatfield College. I discovered when I arrived that Hatfield, while modest in its academic record, was comfortably the strongest college at sport; one of its students, Pete Warfield, actually played rugby for England while at the college. I wholeheartedly embraced the spirit of the establishment, barely attending a lecture in my first year, with the result that I failed all my first-year exams, and was threatened with expulsion unless I resat and passed them all in August. To the visible surprise of my tutors, I managed to replace three fails with three passes. In the second year, I failed to complete my dissertation (on the concentration of certain ions in the body fluids of Chilopoda and Diplopoda) by the deadline of the end of the summer term (the truth was, I had failed even to start it); so I lost another summer to catching up and scraping through. On the other side of the ledger, I played rugby for the college and fives and squash for the university. And most important, I met Vanessa, who became my girlfriend. One of my opening gambits was to take her on a hunting expedition for specimens for my dissertation – centipedes and millipedes. With romantic dates like that, no wonder she later agreed to marry me.

My university career ended, predictably enough, with a lower second class honours degree in Zoology. Strong-armed by Vanessa into doing some work, I actually came quite close to getting an upper second; but the faculty debated long and hard and decided, I was told on a split vote, that my failure to deliver a dissertation on time should disqualify me. I had, meanwhile, been offered a place to do a masters at Imperial College in Applied Entomology. But with only a lower second, there was no government grant forthcoming. So I had to go and find a job.

I stayed up in the North-East for that post-university summer. I got a summer job a few miles away from Durham in Spennymoor, at a factory making fluorescent strip lights. My role was in the paint plant. The job was simple enough. The metal carcasses for the lights were placed on hooks on a raised conveyor belt. They disappeared into the paint machine, then reappeared a while later, gleaming white and hot to the touch, the paint having been blow-dried en route. My job was to unhook them from the conveyor belt and stack them neatly on a pallet. They would then be picked up by a forklift truck and transported to their place of union with the lighting tubes. There was a problem, however; try as I did, I couldn’t lift the carcasses off their hooks quickly enough – with the result that some of them were making a second circuit through the paint plant, acquiring an unwanted second coat. This initially caused hilarity amongst the permanent workforce – ‘you’ve been to university but you can’t do this’ – then eventually exasperation. But in those far-off kinder days, I wasn’t fired as I deserved: instead I got a welcome transfer to driving the forklift trucks, notwithstanding my never having done this before. Health and safety wasn’t such a downer in those days.