CENTRE POINT
Mr Seitz has been sane beyond endurance
SIMON JENKINS
Ray Seitz retires today as America's envoy in London. Diplomatic etiquette requires that he be described in farewell Speeches as the best holder of that office for. . . er, for some time. Over the past month a savage attack of hospitality has been crippling his liver, cramping his facial muscles and swelling his ego. He glides through it all with a saintly smile. Mr Seitz is big in the chancelleries of London just now. He has triple-A charm.
Charles Price was also described as the best American ambassador to London for, er, some time. But what is the test? The mystique of ambassadorship is elusive. Nobody ever says what it means to be good at it, let alone 'professional'. For the first time, Britain and America are represented in each other's country not by campaign donors or old stagers dragged from retire- ment but by active diplomats. Mr Seitz and Britain's Sir Robin Renwick in Washington are professionals in their prime. They are friends and know each other so well it is said they can communicate by telepathy. Yet Anglo-American relations are awful. Conservative Party aid to George Bush's election campaign was followed by argu- ments over Gatt, over airline routes, over Bosnia, over Gerry Adams. When Bill Clin- ton comes to Europe there is no question of Britain being top of his calling list. The Special Relationship is a museum piece.
The mischievous might wonder if an overtly political ambassador in both capi- tals might have made a difference. Ameri- ca's ambassador to Tokyo, Walter Mon- dale, who refused the London job, uses his hot line to the White House to frequent effect. It will be intriguing to see whether Mr Seitz's highly political successor, Admi- ral William Crowe, will have Clinton on the Heathrow tarmac inside a month. If not, a second equally mischievous conclusion might be drawn, that such envoys do not matter much either way. In the era of the telephone, the jet and the summit confer- ence, an embassy is a backwater. An ambassador is just a double-breasted smile, a fax in spats, an upmarket Jeeves to the expatriate great and good. . Mr Seitz and Sir Robin Renwick pose an impressive challenge to this thesis. Both arrived in their posts from the topmost rung of their profession. Even by the heli- um-filled standards of diplomatic compli- ments, they were 'hot'. Sir Robin won his Spurs in Pretoria in 1989-90. He exploited that rarest phenomenon in a diplomat's life, a host government open to his advice. President de Klerk was ready to listen to Lady Thatcher at the time of the Mandela release and Sir Robin made sure she talked. For his part, Mr Seitz was an inti- mate first of George Schultz and then of James Baker in the State Department. He was an articulate exponent of 'Bush-Bak- erism', a foreign policy built on close-knit alliances and recalled today with nostalgic tears by Europeans. Neither appointment was apolitical. It so happened that the two diplomats were ide- ally suited to their jobs. Sir Robin was a closet Thatcherite and won promotion on the back of his sponsor's enthusiasm. He was to reassure Republican Washington that Thatcherism in foreign affairs had not been assassinated along with the lady her- self. Mr Seitz was less closet in his Republi- canism. He came to London when the Bush-Major axis was hesitantly keeping alive the magic of Reagan-Thatcher and somebody knowledgeable was needed to keep the works well-oiled. Both men saw the rationale of their appointment torn apart. Sir Robin arrived in Washington after the anti-Thatcher putsch and found he was dealing with an administration that was anti-European and did not mind who knew it. He had to keep ringing Europe's bell when the White House was obsessed with the Far East, yet explain why in Britain that bell was a little cracked. Mr Seitz had to tell London that his boss meant no harm in attacking Britain over Bosnia and allowing Gerry Adams a hero's welcome in New York. His BBC interview on the subject deserves a place in every diplomat's archive, deftly defending his government yet hinting at some higher wisdom to which he alone was privy.
Mr Seitz and Sir Robin both struggle to avoid the term 'Special Relationship'. Yet the phrase will not go away, taunting and snapping at their feet at every turn. Mr Seitz rejected it in his talk to the Pilgrims in London last week, then spent half an hour explaining its potency. He might have quot- ed a former ambassador who remarked, somewhat desperately, that a relationship can be special without being good. But then the Special Relationship has always been, as Talleyrand said of treachery, 'largely a question of dates'. There was no way that Mr Clinton and Mr Major would have a bond equal to that between President Rea- gan and Lady Thatcher. But a State Department official could still shock a Lon- don dinner recently by remarking that 'Washington nowadays regards the French government as leading for Europe.'
I suppose two 'political' appointees might have jolted the Anglo-American machine into a higher gear. The Seitz-Renwick axis was solid on the Adams affair but to no effect. The best they could achieve was no second visa. Yet I cannot believe that Admiral Crowe will produce a swift rap- prochement between Messrs Clinton and Major — any more than would the dispatch of Sir Norman Fowler or John Gummer to Washington. The truth of the matter is that where governments mean relations to be bad, ambassadors cannot make them good. They are a medium, not the message. The messages of governments have a thousand other conduits these days.
All an ambassador can do is prevent rela- tions getting needlessly worse. On this sub- ject Mr Seitz is quietly emphatic. The worse relations between heads of government might be, he says, the more vital a cool head with an institutional memory. A vast amount of public-sector business flows back and forth across the Atlantic. Two thirds of the staff at the British embassy in Washington are nothing to do with the For- eign Office. Somebody must be in some sort of charge. While the family is throwing the crockery about upstairs, below stairs must remain in good order. The survival of the great house depends on it.
This is how I like to see the Seitz-Ren- wick era. The preposterous Woosters and Binghams are in another fix. Great-aunts are biffing drunk baronets and Pongo is losing Daphne to Squidge. But Jeeves is there. He has the ice-pack. He knows how to mix a raw-egg-and-bullshot the morning after. Jeeves has read the plot. The ending is in his head. Thank God that Jeeves is still sane. Mr Seitz has been sane beyond endurance.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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