Paul Torday - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

© 2007

Title

Extracts from a Return to an Address of the Honourable House of Commons by the Foreign Affairs Committee and a Report into the Circumstances surrounding the decision to introduce salmon into the Yemen (Yemen Salmon Fishing Project), and the subsequent events.

Letter

Fitzharris & Price

Land Agents & Consultants

St James’s Street

London

Dr Alfred Jones

National Centre for Fisheries Excellence

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Smith Square

London

15 May

Dear Dr Jones,

We have been referred to you by Peter Sullivan at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Directorate for Middle East and North Africa). We act on behalf of a client with access to very substantial funds, who has indicated his wish to sponsor a project to introduce salmon, and the sport of salmon fishing, into the Yemen.

We recognise the challenging nature of such a project, but we have been assured that the expertise exists within your organisation to research and project manage such work, which of course would bring international recognition and very ample compensation for any fisheries scientists who became involved. Without going into any further details at this time, we would like to seek a meeting with you to identify how such a project could be initiated and resourced, so that we may report back to our client and seek further instructions.

We wish to emphasise that this is regarded by our client, who is a very eminent Yemeni citizen, as a flagship project for his country. He has asked us to make clear that there will be no unreasonable financial constraints. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office supports this project as a symbol of Anglo-Yemeni cooperation.

Yours sincerely,

( Ms) Harriet Chetwode-Talbot

Letter

National Centre for Fisheries Excellence

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Smith Square

London

Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot

Fitzharris & Price

Land Agents & Consultants

St James’s Street

London

Dear Ms Chetwode-Talbot,

Dr Jones has asked me to thank you for your letter dated 15 May and reply as follows.

Migratory salmonids require cool, well-oxygenated water in which to spawn. In addition, in the early stages of the salmon life cycle, a good supply of fly life indigenous to northern European rivers is necessary for the juvenile salmon parr to survive. Once the salmon parr evolves into its smolt form, it then heads downriver and enters saltwater. The salmon then makes its way to feeding grounds off Iceland, the Faroes or Greenland. Optimum sea temperatures for the salmon and its natural food sources are between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius.

We conclude that conditions in the Yemen and its geographical location relatively remote from the North Atlantic make the project your client has proposed unfeasible, on a number of fundamental grounds. We therefore regret we will be unable to help you any further in this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Ms Sally Thomas (Assistant to Dr Jones)

Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence

From:

David Sugden

To:

Dr Alfred Jones

Subject:

Fitzharris & Price⁄Salmon⁄Yemen

Date:

3 June

Alfred,

I have just received a call from Herbert Berkshire, who is private secretary to the parliamentary under secretary of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The FCO view is very clear that this project is to be given our fullest consideration. Notwithstanding the very real practical difficulties in the proposal from Fitzharris & Price, of which as your director I am fully aware, the FCO feel that we should seek to give what support we can to this project.

Given the recent reductions in grant-in-aid funding for NCFE, we should not be too hasty to decline work which apparently connects us to excellent private sector funding sources.

Yours,

David

Memo

From:

Alfred Jones

To:

Director, NCFE

Subject:

Salmon⁄Yemen

Date: 3 June

David,

I appreciate the points you have raised in your memo of today’s date. Having given the matter my fullest consideration, I remain unable to see how we could help Fitzharris & Price and their client. The prospect of introducing salmon to the wadis of the Hadramawt seems to me, quite frankly, risible.

I am quite prepared to back this up with the relevant science, should anyone at the FCO require further information on our grounds for not proceeding.

Alfred

Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence

From:

David Sugden

To:

Dr Alfred Jones

Subject:

Salmon⁄Yemen

Date:

4 June

Dr Jones,

Please accept this memo as my formal instruction to proceed to the next stage of the Yemen salmon project with Fitzharris & Price. I would like you to meet Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and receive a full briefing, following which you are to develop and cost an outline scope of work for this project for me to review and forward to the FCO.

I take full responsibility for this decision.

David Sugden

Email

From:

Fred.jones@ncfe.gov.uk

Date:

4 June

To:

David.Sugden@ncfe.gov.uk

Subject:

Yemen Salmon Project

David,

Can we talk about this? I’ll pop round to your office after the departmental meeting.

Alfred

Email

From:

Fred.jones@ncfe.gov.uk

Date:

4 June

To:

Mary.jones@interfinance.org

Subject:

Job

Darling,

I am being put under unreasonable pressure by David Sugden to put my name to some totally insane project dreamed up by the FCO to do with salmon being introduced into the Yemen. There have been memos flying around on this for days and I suppose I thought it was so bizarre I didn’t even mention it to you last time we spoke. I popped into David S’s office just now and said, ‘Look, David, be reasonable. This project is not only totally absurd and scientifically nonsensical, but if we allow our name to be involved no one in the fisheries world will ever take us seriously again.’

Sugden was totally stone-faced. He said (pompously), ‘This one is coming from higher up. It isn’t just some minister at the FCO with a bee in his bonnet. It goes all the way to the top. You’ve had my instruction. Please get on with it.’

I have not been spoken to like that since I left school. I am seriously considering handing in my resignation.

Love,

Fred

PS: When are you back from your management training course?

Email

From:

Mary.jones@interfinance.org

Date:

4 June

To:

Fred.jones@ncfe.gov.uk

Subject:

Financial realities

Fred,

My annual salary is £75,000 gross and yours is £45,561. Our combined net of tax monthly income is £7333 out of which our mortgage takes £3111, rates, food and other household expenses a further £1200, and that’s before we think about car costs, holidays, and your fishing extravagances.

Resign your job? Don’t be a prat.

Mary

PS: I am home on Thursday but I have to leave on Sunday for New York for a conference on Sarbanes-Oxley.

Memo

From:

Andrew MacFadzean, principal private secretary to the secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs