Sherard Cowper-Coles - Ever the Diplomat - Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

Three other contemporaries were selected for Arabic training. Others went off to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. About half of the entry managed to avoid hard language training and instead brushed up their French, or acquired German or Spanish, for European postings.

We had taken our first steps on the perpetual treadmill of diplomatic life: with the average posting lasting three or so years, you are always either speculating about your next posting or preparing for it. The sense of continual anticipation of working somewhere on something, or with someone, more interesting than your present job is what keeps many diplomats going – and what makes life such a let-down when the wheel finally stops turning.

That summer of 1978 I met up with an Oxford friend who had failed the Foreign Office entrance exam, and asked him what he was now doing. He was working as a rep for Thomson Holidays, ‘on the basis’, he said, ‘that the work will be much the same as in the Diplomatic Service’. As I soon discovered, he wasn’t far wrong.

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