Q&A with OT President, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles

PATRICK THOMPSON (SC5)

Q: What do you do as an international Ambassador?

I was ambassador in three countries: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Essentially you do two things; first you represent the interests of your own country, specifically the government, but also the people, the business, and the culture of your country - to the foreign country in which you are operating. Second, in my view almost equally important, is within the British system, you represent the interests of and explain the country to which you are accredited, to British ministers, British officials, British parliamentarians, and British media. In each of the three countries where I was ambassador part of my job was to make sure the country was understood through the British system, and to people who have a high degree of ignorance and prejudice about it. In Afghanistan, my role was slightly different in that we had a rather serious war going on at the time, with tens of thousands of British troops taking part. Part of my job there was to try and encourage ministers (not so much the Foreign Secretary who understood) but other ministers, to see that this wasn’t just a military problem. The issues were part of a much wider political, economic, and social problem, which couldn’t be solved by pouring in more troops. In Israel, the interesting dimension there was dealing with the British Jewish community, making sure they understood that I was in Israel for them, as well as for Britain more generally.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles

The OTS President, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (PS 68-73), with a career of more than 30 years in the British diplomatic service, spoke to current student Patrick Thompson (Sc5), about his views on international politics and advice about entering work in the Foreign Office. Sherard was also Principal Private Secretary to the UK Foreign Secretary and Head of the Foreign Office Hong Kong Department from 1994 until the handover to China in 1997. After leaving the Foreign Office, he worked for BAE Systems as international business development director. He left BAE Systems in 2013 and is now the Group Head of Government Affairs at HSBC Bank.

Q: Speaking of the conflict in Afghanistan, why do you think the Western coalition (if I can call it that) failed?

Well, because we took on far too much without any real understanding of what it was, and because the United States is constitutionally ill-equipped to pursue this kind of venture. If you are going to stabilise a country in the state Afghanistan was in when we went in the year 2000, you need something called strategic patience. The American republic has a very short attention span, it’s very dysfunctional, it’s divided against itself, not only between parties, not only between the administration and the Congress, but within the administration. So when I was ambassador there, I saw what I had seen as a much younger diplomat in Washington, different parts of the administration fighting each other. The CIA Chief of Station in Afghanistan would go and see President Karzai without telling the American Ambassador. The American General in command, supposedly of all troops in Afghanistan, would complain that the U.S. Marines would not take orders from him because they took orders only from the U.S. Navy. The National Security Council was at war with the Pentagon, the Pentagon was at war with the State Department, it was absolute chaos. America had a lot of money and a lot of troops and a lot of fire power, but no real strategic sense. We went along with it because the British Army wanted to please the Americans, particularly after our performance in Basra, Iraq. Also because the Army in particular wanted resources to prove itself against future expenditure cuts. I’m afraid it was all rather cynical and short term and not thought through, nothing approaching a comprehensive or realistic strategy.

Q: China runs a relatively authoritarian system of government. Do you think that this type of system will eventually collapse, as happened with the Soviet Union and plenty of other authoritarian regimes throughout history.

Chinese people have suffered terribly, a century and a half of being humiliated at the hands of the West and Japan. What they fear above all is chaos. They like order, they like discipline, they are very hard-working, and they like control by their elite who have been chosen on merit. When they

look at the state of Western democracy, the mistakes that have been made; for example here over Brexit and in the United States over Trump, they don’t necessarily want a Western model of government, and the Confucian tradition is very different from ours. So I see it as very different from the former Soviet Union.

Q: Would you say that the modern Communist party are running a governmental system with roots in the Confucian System, the imperial style?

Yes, more in common than we might imagine. When some people here attack the Communist party in China, and people in America do, they forget that it is a party of over 90 million members, and is diverse with many differing points of view within it. It is a system for controlling this vast country of 1.4 billion people of imperial proportions. I was talking to a former British ambassador to China the other day and he said that, if the communist party didn’t exist, you would need some sort of organisation like that for holding this country together and running it as efficiently as you can in the interests of the people. If you talk to Chinese people today, in every family just a generation or two earlier, they experienced appalling suffering whether civil war, the cultural revolution, the warlords, the great leap forward, the Japanese, etc. What they have had over the last 20-30 years is prosperity, stability, educational enlightenment all undreamt of in any recent period of Chinese history. They are very grateful for that, and they attribute that to the wise way in which the Communist party has directed the country.

Q: In the past 4 months or so, Middle Eastern states starting with Qatar have started to recognise Israel. Why do you think that there is suddenly this larger shift in Middle East politics?

President Trump played a large part in this. I think the net outcome is that it is a very good thing. It is good for Israel and it is good for the Middle East. One of the sadnesses over the past few decades is that the creation of Israel, and animosity between Israel and its Arab neighbours,

has meant that the traditional diaspora of Jewish people and other minorities across the Middle East has been driven out. In the 1950’s and earlier much of the cultural and commercial yeast across the Middle East came from the small Christian and Jewish communities, in places like Alexandria, Aleppo, Bagdad, Damascus or Cairo. Anything that starts to restore that can only be considered a good thing. But I am old fashioned enough to hope and wish that this can only be done in a way which gives the Palestinian people some say over ruling the land that they share with the Jewish people.

Q: How do you think that Covid and China’s role with handling it will change their position internationally?

It is a bit early to say. I think it will change their position because it has been used by the Sinophobes to stir up animosity towards China, although I think China’s record with handling the virus stands in comparison with many other countries. I am not in a position to judge the transparency at the beginning, but certainly in terms of handling the virus and the help that they have given people around the world. It has been a humbling year for the world, to see how this virus can bring economic activity to a great juddering halt in so many places, with great suffering for millions of people in many different ways. I hope that the lesson drawn from this, but perhaps won’t necessarily be drawn from it, is that international cooperation in working together to deal with the global threats we face, whether it is from climate change, lack of global governance or public health, these need to be addressed collectively and together, and that decoupling from China is the worst thing that could be done.

Q: What do you think the role of private business should be in politics?

Private business needs to feed its views in, politicians need to take account of the views and interests of business, but their job is to balance the interests of a particular business against the wider needs of society and the country. There needs to be a proper dialogue between government and business. It shouldn’t be an exclusive dialogue but part of a wider system of engagement between government and all the constituent parts of any society. Things can get out of balance when there is no dialogue, as has happened for a while under one of our recent Prime Ministers where there was no engagement with business. Or if you get business being too dominant and abusing its position, particularly if you get private business owners using their money and influence to buy access to secure policies that benefit them or their businesses. As always it is a question of seeking a balance.

Q: Where do you think the UK stands currently on that?

I think it is now better. The current Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) has opened up to dialogue with business. Once Brexit is finally behind us we will face huge challenges of the recapitalisation of British industry to pay down the debts that have been incurred to find capital for innovation and investment, and the right way to address this must be through a partnership of the kind that the Prime Minister and his ministers are promoting.

Q: What was it that made you want to go into diplomacy in the Foreign Office?

I never thought I would get into the diplomatic service, but I just knew that if I did get in, I would enjoy it. So it proved. Almost from the first day I loved it! There are three institutions in my life that I have really enjoyed working for and with. One was being at Tonbridge School, I was happy from the start here. Second was the diplomatic service, where I had thirty-two very happy years. The third is my present employer, HSBC, where I have been very lucky with the colleagues I have had, and the work I have done which I found very interesting.

Q: How do you think Tonbridge has changed since when you were here as a boy?

It is obviously even better equipped than it was when I was here in terms of facilities. It has doubled in size in the number of boys. But in essence I don’t think it has changed, the commitment to excellent education, the worries about access for people whose parents don’t have the means to send their children here, the issues are the same. Tonbridge

Chinese people have suffered terribly… What they fear above all is chaos. They like order... and they like control by their elite who have been chosen on merit.

to me seems to be making a pretty good success in steering its way through all these different challenges. To survive, a great educational institution like this needs to adapt and change.

Q: How do you think you were as a Tonbridge boy?

I was hopeless at sport. I had a friend who had been a thalidomide baby; he had an artificial leg and he beat me at fives! My batting average in my last season of cricket was one eighth of a run. I remember running the CRAS, I was running round it and heard a boy from the CCF with a radio, ‘CowperColes has just come past, we can pack up and go home now’. But I went on to be head boy. I had a wonderful housemaster in Bernard Wheeler. Parkside in those days was a house of poets and intellectuals. We had to borrow silver cups from Park House for our House photo as we hadn’t won any! We had a great housemaster who couldn’t care less about sport. Yet I got on very well with masters like Mike Bushby who taught me about China and was master in charge of cricket, and with John Gibbs who was master in charge of rugby ●