MPs on manoeuvres

 

Charles Crawford

 

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Significant official time and effort go to helping ministers deal accurately with parliamentary questions, MPs letters, briefing committees, debates and all the other forms of parliamentary activity. This is a central contribution to the British democratic process.

 

MPs sometimes escape abroad, and the question for a typical embassy is how much should they do to host and support visits by British MPs?

 

There are some dull procedural guidelines. The reality is more complex. Any such visit takes a lot of accurate organising in advance, plus intense concentration to keep the unruly group together and marching through their programme in good time.

 

Yet a full visit by a parliamentary committee may well not advance any obvious embassy/FCO/HMG objective, or even any serious parliamentary one. On the contrary. A substantive visit detracts from pursuing such objectives, diverting staff and some money into setting it up.

 

Too bad. They come anyway. And they expect to be looked after.

 

Over the years working in successive embassies I hit upon the right way to deal with Parliamentary delegations.

 

First, take Parliament seriously. Go out of one’s way to be helpful, frank and positive. Start the visit not with a learned discourse on the boring theme of their visit, but rather a lurid who-is-stuffing-whom briefing on the local political scene. MPs love politics. Odd, that.

 

Second, keep handy a bottle or two of reasonable whisky. Or gin (plus a little tonic). Even better, both. By late afternoon after a series of laborious meetings in stuffy offices the collective British parliamentary mind turns to the bar. When planning the visit do not delay the inevitable.

 

When a visiting minibus full of MPs studying the mysteries of Polish agriculture went into a wintry ditch in deepest Poland, my second secretary was armed and ready. Out came the whisky. Amid considerable upheaval, icy mud and hearty mirth the minibus was restored to the road. British democracy renewed its advance across the central European steppes. A warmly praised triumph for the embassy machine.

 

MPs these days arrive at embassies in fairly discrete categories.

 

Old Labour MPs appear to enjoy life. They have a healthy suspicion of all foreigners and appreciate our embassies, urging ambassadors to be tough in a Dad’s Army ‘they don’t like that cold steel up ‘em’ sort of way. They think that embassies are there to project British power and influence. The more the better, especially if embassies help win British firms export contracts.

New Labour MPs from the pallid ranks of the Universitariat do not appear to enjoy life. They approve of all foreigners (other than Americans) but have a surly suspicion of British embassies and seem to think that most ambassadors are annoying public schoolboys (as of course a few are). They look sniffily at embassy receptions organised to help them meet influential locals – why is all that public money being wasted on lavish bourgeois hospitality?

 

Lib Dem MPs love Europeans and crack few jokes.

 

Conservative MPs usually dress smartly and take foreign policy very seriously.

 

Most male MPs don’t try to grope Embassy female (or male) staff.

 

Women MPs do not grope embassy male or female staff, although I once encountered a woman minister who kicked off her shoes and curled kittenishly on her office sofa.

 

Many years ago I took a group of MPs round scenic Cape Point in South Africa. This jolly ride was made all the jollier by the stream of coarse ethnic jokes flying between a very high Conservative and very old (and very left) Labour member, their jocularity intensified by the sheer naughtiness of concealing such behaviour from their respective constituents.

 

British MPs have the great virtue of getting to the point, although sometimes it’s the wrong one. Within most groups of MPs there is normally at least one determined to focus exclusively on the Novi Pazar question or the central importance in global affairs of unexploded WW2 chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea. Such an MP will not let other factors such as real life complicate the issue.  

 

But usually their direct, no-nonsense style plus the elaborate British parliamentary courtesies and good humour within the visiting group make a positive impression on their local interlocutors. And the clerks write it all up beautifully, so history records even the doziest encounters making some sense.

 

In short, British MPs on their overseas forays project an image of engaging cynicism, ribald humour, frumpy clothes (Memo to committee clerks: confiscate all MPs beige anoraks at Heathrow; issue Kiwi shoe polish), and a blunt, honest directness, all combined with a slight bafflement that so many foreigners by now still have not accepted the wisdom of becoming British.

 

Charles Crawford has been British Ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw.