And Thereby Hangs a Tale

Diana had decided to wait in the car, as she assumed the interview wouldn’t take long. After all, every member of the committee had known Robin for over twenty years. But after half an hour she began to glance at her watch every few minutes, and couldn’t believe that Robin still hadn’t appeared an hour later. She had just decided to go in and ask the steward what was holding her husband up when the clubhouse door swung open and Robin marched out, a grim look on his face. She jumped out of the car and ran toward him.

“Anyone who wishes to reapply for membership cannot hope to be elected for at least another fifteen years,” he said, walking straight past her.

“Are there no exceptions?” asked Diana, chasing after him.

“Only for the new president,” said Robin, “who will be made an honorary life member. The rules don’t seem to apply to him.”

“But that really is so unfair,” said Diana, bursting into tears. “I shall personally complain to the new president.”

“I’m sure you will, my dear,” said Robin, taking his wife in his arms. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll take any notice.”

THE UNDIPLOMATIC DIPLOMAT*

10

Percival Arthur Clarence Forsdyke—his mother called him Percival, while the few friends he had called him Percy—was born into a family, which had played its part in ensuring that the sun never set on the British Empire.

Percy’s grandfather, Lord Clarence Forsdyke, had been Governor General of the Sudan, while his father, Sir Arthur Forsdyke KCMG, had been our man in Mesopotamia. So, naturally, great things were expected of young Percy.

Within hours of entering this world, he had been put down for the Dragon prep school, Winchester College, and Trinity, Cambridge, establishments at which four generations of Forsdykes had been educated.

After Cambridge, it was assumed that Percy would follow his illustrious forebears into the Foreign Office, where he would be expected at least to equal and possibly even to surpass their achi

evements. All might have gone to plan had it not been for one small problem: Percy was far too clever for his own good. He won a scholarship to the Dragon at the age of eight, an election to Winchester College before his eleventh birthday, and the Anderson Classics Prize to Trinity while he was still in short trousers. After leaving Cambridge with a double first in Classics, he sat the Civil Service exam, and frankly no one was surprised when he came top in his year.

Percy was welcomed into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with open arms, but that was when his problems began. Or, to be more accurate, when the Foreign Office’s problems began.

The mandarins at the FCO, who are expected to identify high flyers worthy of being fast-tracked, came to the reluctant conclusion that, despite Forsdyke’s academic achievements, the young man lacked common sense, possessed few social skills, and cared little for the diplomatic niceties required when representing your country abroad—something of a disadvantage if you wish to pursue a career in the Foreign Office.

During his first posting, to Nigeria, Percy told the Minister of Finance that he had no grasp of economics. The problem was that the minister didn’t have any grasp of economics, so Percy had to be dispatched back to England on the first available boat.

After a couple of years in administration, Percy was given a second chance, and sent to Paris as an assistant secretary. He might have survived this posting had he not told the French President’s wife at a government reception that the world was overpopulated, and she wasn’t helping matters by producing so many children. Percy had a point, as the lady in question had seven offspring and was pregnant at the time, but he was still to be found packing his bags before lunch the following day. A further spell in admin followed before he was given his third, and final, chance.

On this occasion he was dispatched to one of Her Majesty’s smaller colonies in Central Africa as a deputy consul. Within six months he had managed to cause an altercation between two tribes who had lived in harmony for over a century. The following morning Percy was escorted onto a British Airways plane clutching a one-way ticket to London, and was never offered a foreign posting again.

On returning to London, Percy was appointed as an archives clerk (no one gets the sack at the FCO), and allocated a small office in the basement.

As few people at the FCO ever found any reason to visit the basement, Percy flourished. Within weeks he had instigated a new procedure for cataloging statements, speeches, memoranda, and treaties, and within months he could locate any document, however obscure, required by even the most demanding minister. By the end of the year he could offer an opinion on any FCO demand, based on historic precedent, often without having to refer to a file.

No one was surprised when Percy was appointed Senior Archivist after his boss unexpectedly took early retirement. However, Percy still yearned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become our man in some foreign field, to be addressed by all and sundry as “Your Excellency.” Sadly, it was not to be, because Percy was not allowed out of the basement for the next thirty years, and only then when he retired at the age of sixty.

At Percy’s leaving party, held in the India Room of the FCO, the Foreign Secretary described him in his tribute speech as a man with an unrivaled encyclopedic memory who could probably recite every agreement and treaty Britain had ever entered into. This was followed by laughter and loud applause. No one heard Percy mutter under his breath, “Not every one, Minister.”

Six months after his retirement, the name of Percival Arthur Clarence Forsdyke appeared on the New Year’s Honors List. Percy had been awarded the CBE for services to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

He read the citation without any satisfaction. In fact, he felt he was a failure and had let the family down. After all, his grandfather had been a peer of the realm, his father a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George, whereas he ended up a mere Commander of a lower order.

However, Percy had a plan to rectify the situation, and to rectify it quickly.

Once he had left the FCO, Percy did not head straight for the British Library to begin work on his memoirs, as he felt he had achieved nothing worthy of historic record, nor did he retire to his country home to tend his roses, possibly because he didn’t have a country home, or any roses. However, he did heed the Foreign Secretary’s words, and decided to make use of his unrivaled encyclopedic memory.

Deep in the recesses of his remarkable mind, Percy recalled an ancient British law, which had been passed by an Act of Parliament in 1762, during the reign of King George III. It took Percy some considerable time to double-check, in fact, triple-check, that the Act had not been repealed at any time in the past two hundred years. He was delighted to discover that, far from being repealed, it had been enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and again in the Charter of the United Nations in 1945. Clearly neither organization had someone of Percy’s caliber tucked away in its basement. Having read the Act several times, Percy decided to visit the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore, where he spent hours poring over charts that detailed the coastal waters surrounding the British Isles.

After completing his research at the RGS, Percy was satisfied that everything was in place for him to comply with clause 7, addendum 3, of the Territories Settlement Act of 1762.

He returned to his home in Pimlico and locked himself away in his study for three weeks—with only Horatio, his three-legged, one-eyed cat, for company—while he put the final touches to a detailed memorandum that would reveal the real significance of the Territories Settlement Act of 1762, and its relevance for Great Britain in the year 2009.

Once he’d completed his task, he placed the nineteen-page handwritten document, along with a copy of the 1762 Act showing one particular clause highlighted, in a large white envelope, which he addressed to Sir Nigel Henderson KCMG, Permanent Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street, Whitehall, London SW1A 2AH. He then put the unsealed envelope in the top drawer of his desk, where it would remain for the next three months while he disappeared off the face of the earth. Horatio purred.