[Q] You got in, was there any string pulling?

No, I think there was no string-pulling there, largely because my mother would've much preferred me to be a journalist anyway, and my father didn't really want me to go into the Foreign Office very much. I'd say he wanted to send me to the Harvard Business School, but I hated that idea, and so neither of my parents really were very much in favour of this Foreign Office thing, so no string-pulling there.

And I started off in the Foreign Office in Northern Department, which covered not only the whole of Scandinavia but all communist Eastern Europe. I mean, it included Bulgaria – so much for Northern. And it was extremely interesting and I did it... I hope, well, I did it as well as I could, but I was always longing to get sent abroad because that was the thing, you know, that was why I'd joined. And I was about three years before they... living in London before they let me go abroad. Then eventually I was posted, as they'd always say they were going to do, to Moscow and, you know, at last I was going to be able to polish up my Russian and get it fluent. And I was looking forward to it enormously, wrote to the Ambassador as you do, 'I'm so glad that I'm coming on your staff', and I got a very nice little letter back. I even went as far as buying myself a new umbrella and having my name and British Embassy Moscow in Russian written around the brass thing. Three weeks before I was due to leave, they switched – you're not going to Moscow after all, you're going to Belgrade. Mother, string-pulling. Again. I knew it.