A master of diplomacy

Jul 17 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool’s former leading diplomat tells Peter Elson why he’s pleased to have put the Foreign Office behind him

IT IS a depressing experience talking to Sir Ivor Roberts. That’s not a personal criticism of the man himself, who was brought up in Crosby and is Britain’s former ambassador to Italy.

Depression sets in on hearing how this very sophisticated, worldly and highly experienced 60-year-old is so relieved to have retired from the Diplomatic Service.

Yet he is precisely the sort of individual that you hope is serving our interests at the highest levels behind the scenes on the world stage.

Part of his public appeal is his forthright views, which have severely ruffled the feathers in the diplomatic hen coop more than once.

A leaked confidential remark describing George W Bush as “Al Qaeda’s best recruiting sergeant” made international headlines in 2004.

In spite of reflecting what many millions of people worldwide were thinking, it ran contrary to Britain’s official position of prosecuting the Iraq war allied to the US.

Then there was his valedictory despatch to the Foreign Office on retirement in 2006. Such extended memos were traditionally open letters.

After hearing the contents of Sir Ivor’s bruising message, horrified Foreign Office mandarins banned such publications.

Of course, the press immediately sensed that rare phenomenon: a powerfully informed source telling the unvarnished truth instead of the usual anodyne guff fed to the public from on high.

And, naturally, that won’t do. But Sir Ivor regrets nothing, as he contemplates the world from the president’s lodge, where he is head of Trinity College, Oxford.

Relieved of ambassadorial restrictions, he’s even more outspoken. His hackles rise describing what he claims is the “dismantling from within” of the British Diplomatic Service, “once enviously regarded as the finest in the world”.

He can barely contain his contempt for the “politicisation” of the Foreign Office under Tony Blair’s Labour government, with highly experienced and skilled senior diplomats being bossed around and over-ruled by ignorant and arrogant young party officials and consultants.

“You have ambassadors and senior diplomats filling in multiple Foreign Office forms about achieving management performance targets.

“Or they’re having to waste time assuring Whitehall their embassies are cutting carbon emissions by 7% over last year.

“Meantime, where are the memos from the Foreign Office about foreign policy? Or debating how we intend to get out of the mess we’re in with Iraq?

“High quality diplomatic negotiations can stop wars and are infinitely cheaper than going to war and later clearing up the resulting physical, social and political wreckage.”

So, beneath all the international glamour and diplomatic corps savoir faire, he’s really just another subversive Scouser?

“Absolutely,” he chuckles, embracing the soubriquet without hesitation.

The only child of Leonard, an accountant, and Rosa Maria Roberts, he was born in 1946, in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, Liverpool, and moved to Crosby when he was three.

“Until then I lived in Jubilee Road and Green Lane and other exciting spots,” he says.

“My parents, who are both dead, met in Italy. My mother was Italian and later worked for the Italian Consulate in Liverpool. They met at the tail-end of the war, while my father was in the 8th Army.

“He spoke Italian and was assigned as a liaison officer to the Italian Army after the Armistice in 1943. I could speak Italian before I spoke English.

“It was a bit of a shock for my mother to come to post-war Liverpool, with the bombsites and rationing. But during the siege of Rome, like the rest of the city, she had been almost starving until the Allies broke through.”

Living at Fairways, Crosby, and attending the nearby St Mary’s College, he won a scholarship on September 24, 1963 (his birthday), to study modern languages at Keble College, Oxford.

He went straight into the diplomatic service from Oxford, after the annual Foreign Office trawl of likely recruits.

After a year at the West African Office in London, it was off to the Lebanon. From there he advanced to serve in Paris, Luxembourg, Canberra (where he met his wife, Elizabeth) and Madrid.

His first appointment as ambassador was Britain’s first to the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1994.

Penultimately British ambassador in Dublin, his final posting was to Rome as British ambassador to Italy and San Marino, 2003-6. He expanded his fluent Italian, French, Spanish and German to include “passable” Serbo-Croat in Yugoslavia, joking: “It’s getting less passable as time goes on.”

While resident in Belgrade, he conducted negotiations on behalf of the international mediators Lord Owen (now Chancellor of Liverpool University) and Carl Bildt with both the Yugoslavs and Bosnian Serbs.

He was also involved in negotiating the release of British soldiers held hostage by the Bosnian Serbs in 1995.

While ambassador to Ireland in 1999-2003, relations were better than previously, but far from perfect, when he gave up diplomatic immunity to give evidence against the head of the Real IRA.

Both in Ireland and Italy, Sir Ivor was accompanied by armed guards.

“Having had one British ambassador assassinated in Dublin (in 1976), the Irish security authorities perceived there was still a threat and they were determined they weren’t going to lose two,” he says.

“It was a very tense moment at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin. But I suppose the most difficult time was during the war in Yugoslavia.

“In Belgrade occasionally, I felt things were a bit hairy. When the troops were kidnapped by Serbs, I travelled from Serbia into Bosnia, it occurred to me they might welcome the addition of an ambassador as well or instead of their existing hostages.”

His wife, Elizabeth, was a diplomat in the Australian Foreign Service so better understands being pitched into an alien culture at short notice. The couple have two sons and a daughter.

Lady Roberts studied Balkan history while in Belgrade. She is publishing a book on Montenegro and was a university lecturer while posted in Dublin.

“My wife’s grandparents lived in Olivia Street, Bootle, and emigrated to Australia in the 1880s from Liverpool. We’ve been back to look at their house,” says Sir Ivor.

Given his love of Oxford, it’s unlikely that Lady Roberts will have to cope with finally retiring to Crosby, not far from where her antecedents escaped to Australia all those years ago.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk