Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

For over 30 years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile posts across the globe.Entering the Foreign Office fresh from Oxford in 1977, he enjoyed a meteoric rise with postings in Beirut, Alexandria and Cairo, Washington, and Paris, and working on Hong Kong, punctuated with spells in London, where the young diplomat had a baptism of fire writing foreign affairs speeches for Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher.In 1999, he was made Principal Private Secretary to the irascible Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, providing the book with some of i…