Introductory Remarks

Patrick Salmon Chief Historian, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office

I. Introduction to FCDO Historians

Thank you for coming, and welcome to what is actually our first in-person event since 2019, before the pandemic. Welcome, too, to the first event organised by the FCDO Historians, as wehavebeen since2020. It is wonderful to bebackin this roomandto seesomanyold friends and new faces.

Just to give you a bit of background to what we are going to be doing today, if I can take you back right to the beginning of the pandemic. At that point, we were forced to change our working practices, as everybody else was. For many months, we worked entirely from home, and during that time many new tasks came our way. We had to give historical perspectives on the pandemic itself; on Black Lives Matter, which emerged that summer; on Russian disinformation; and, most recently, of course, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One thing we could not do was work on our main series of documents, Documents on British Policy Overseas, our flagship series, but we did not give up on publishing entirely.

On the contrary, thanks to the initiative of my colleague Richard Smith, we organised a new series, Documents from the British Archives, which we published free online; and also, if you wanted, you could buy a copy cheaply from Amazon. The idea was to showcase selections of some of our earlier publications, and also to make available documents alreadyin The National Archives that were relatively little known, difficult to access or simply too big to be conveniently consulted.

Since 2020, we have published four volumes in this new series. They cover the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Helsinki Conference of 1975 and the Lancaster House Conference on the independence of Zimbabwe in 1979.

II. Publication of the Butler Report

Throughout that time, we had something bigger in mind – and something we had been talking about to Ali Ansari for quite a long time – and that was the publication of Rohan Butler’s 1962 report on the relinquishment of Abadan. Butler’s report was, of course, important in many ways we shall be exploring today but, at 300,000 words, it was intimidatingly long. Anybody who tried to look at it or use it in The National Archives had, as we know, great difficulty Of course, when we looked at it, we found this fairly intimidating too, but Gill Bennett solved the problem by typing the entire thing out herself. That is the way we do it!

This is the publication we are presenting to you today, and it is freely available on the table over there. Please take a copy when you leave. It is by far the largest in the series so far, but also, we hope, far more readable, far more accessible, with new editorial material, as you will hear in a minute, and also some rather important documents that resulted from Butler’s original report

III. Introduction of Speakers

For the presentation today, we are joined by the two experts who contributed, respectively, an introductory essay and an afterword to the report: Professor Ali Ansari of St Andrews University and my colleague Gill Bennett They are chaired by Sir Geoffrey Adams, who of course, as you know, is a former Ambassador to Iran, but also an old friend of the FCDO Historians. Manyof us will remember that he presided over the release of another major report on Iran 11 years ago, which was Nicholas Browne’s investigation into the events surrounding the fall of the Shah in 1978 and 1979. Of course, many people in the room have their own personal experience of working in Iran, and we very much hope they will contribute to the discussion later today.

We will not be joined, as we had hoped to be, by the Right Honourable Jack Straw, at least not in the physical sense. Jack has been quite ill recently. He is doing well now, but, on his doctor’s advice, has decided it would be unwise to jeopardise his recovery by attending in person. However, as one who was deeply engaged with Iran as Foreign Secretary, and as the author, as many will know, of The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why It Distrusts Britain, published in 2019, Jack was keen to contribute his thoughts on the Butler report We have recorded a short interview with him, and we will play part of that later this afternoon. Finally, we have another reason to be together today again, as manyhave been suspecting, and that is to say goodbye to my predecessor as Chief Historian, Gill Bennett, on what she claims will be her final retirement We will have some drinks next door after this main event.

IV. Conclusion

Before I finish, I thought I should just make one more reflection That is that we are meeting at a time when the people of Iran are, again, courageously standing up against an oppressive regime, and I am sure that all of us will have in mind today a great people with a remarkable heritage. I hope that their aspirations for freedom will come closer to being realised this time Thank you.

Introduction of Speakers

Sir Geoffrey Adams Former British Ambassador to Iran

Thank you very much indeed, Patrick. Many congratulations to you and your team for this fantastic initiative. I am delighted to be here, back in this building, to celebrate it. As Patrick said, I am just the Chair of this event I will introduce first Gill Bennett, and then Ali Ansari. Just in case there is anyone who does not know her well, Gill joined the FCDO Historians in 1972 and was Chief Historian from 1995 to 2005. At the same time, she was senior editor of the official documentary history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO). She specialised in the history of secret intelligence and has published extensively on it, as well as a book on decision-making in British foreign policy, Six Moments of Crisis.