A hard day’s knight

Date: 18/07/1996

IT is never easy being the UK's ambassador to the EU. In the last three months, it has been almost impossible.

But someone has got to do it and the someone in the hot seat at the moment is the newly-knighted Stephen Wall, a man who has proved that it is possible to continue to win friends and influence people even while engaging in the most infuriating strategy of non-cooperation.

“It was business, not personal,” says one understanding diplomat from another national delegation, referring to the way the ambassador handled the British beef blockade.

And that just about sums up the nature of the serious and donnish Wall.

Tall and trim, soft-spoken and to all appearances constantly in deep thought, Wall has risen smoothly through the foreign office machine - with only one hiccup - to take on one of the toughest, highest-profile jobs in the UK diplomatic service.

It has never been tougher than when British Prime Minister John Major hit the roof over the beef ban and ordered retaliation. The government troops in Brussels were commanded to go over the top, in more ways than one, and engage the enemy.

Like all good battalion leaders, who follow their orders whatever they think of the decision to fight, Wall led the forces of the UK representation from the front.

What he actually thought of the decision was not much, by all accounts. The tactic was not to the taste of the patrician ambassador. After all, diplomacy is the art of avoiding confrontation, not thundering into it.

He made his voice heard in Downing Street, apparently making eleventh-hour appeals to his political boss even while mustering his army in the Council of Minister trenches in Brussels and Luxembourg.

But whatever his own views about the government's beef crisis tactics, Wall just got on with the job once the war was declared, blocking around the clock, relishing the diplomatic challenge of displaying obduracy and being difficult and objectionable while striving to avoid alienating his fellow ambassadors.

He succeeded.

“Carrying out your government's hostile instructions is the easy part. But doing it with tact and maintaining long-term credibility is the hard part,” says one who observed the cut and thrust at close quarters. “Stephen just got on and did it.”

There has been a lot to be getting on with in a busy first year in the job for Wall, who took over from previous incumbent Sir John Kerr last summer.

He has been impressive as the UK's representative at the Intergovernmental Conference, again pushed into the role of baddy when his natural inclination, one feels, is to play the goody.

In either part, Wall is scrupulously unreadable, painfully unflappable.

Arguably, in these heady anti-EU days in the UK, he is now exercising a more direct impact on a wider range of legislation than most members of the British cabinet.

But the ambassador himself would not put it like that. He would probably raise an eyebrow, adopt the small grimace that passes for a grin and give a little shake of the head before dismissing the notion in his hesitant, self-conscious way.

To the outsider, Wall appears deeply shy and unsure of himself - but appearances can be deceptive. He simply is not a live wire on the social scene. He is a passive player on the cocktail party circuit, content to be engaged in conversation, but unlikely to detain one with a string of ribald jokes. Small talk is not his thing. There is no known sighting of Wall doing the conga.

The ambassador and his wife were notable absentees earlier this year on a three-day jolly around Sienna for Coreper II (the Committee of permanent representatives) members and spouses, courtesy of the Italian presidency. A fine old time was had exploring the countryside of eastern Tuscany and sampling local products, especially some very good Toscanelli cigars.

Speculation that the ambassador had been ordered to cry off as part of the BSE non-cooperation policy was wide of the mark. He had never planned to go on the excursion, his people insisted, because of a prior engagement in London.

Praise for his skills, which is plentiful, stops short of summing him up as the life and soul of the party. “He is very articulate. Whatever he says, even when it is at variance with the general mood of the meeting, is always well argued,” says one IGC follower.

“He is very logical and clear in the positions he puts across. He is very calm, very reasoned,” says another.

Not a man given to public emotion of any kind, Wall is aware that this self-effacing demeanour can be mistaken for dullness.

When BBC cameras followed him round recently for the day, they turned up at the British ambassador's Rue Ducale residence at 6am, at his request, so they could film him jogging around the Royal Park.

Wall was concerned to show that he is not just another grey man in a grey suit with a life devoted to piles of paperwork. It was no one-off stunt either. When based in London, Wall used to start his day with a brisk run around Battersea Park, getting to his desk by 7.30am.

It has worked too. As he approaches his 50th birthday next January, Wall remains a completely paunch-free zone.

Married with one son, he joined the diplomatic service in 1968 straight from Cambridge, with his eye set on eventually becoming the British ambassador to Paris.

There are plenty of fast-track diplomats answering to the description of efficient, discreet and workaholic, but what marked Wall out ultimately was his ability to back a winner.

While other senior foreign office types were muttering that Major was not up to the job of foreign secretary in 1989, Wall stuck by him, earning the future leader's trust.

Wall was at Major's elbow throughout the Maastricht summit in December 1991, and is regarded as chief architect of the UK's post-Thatcher European charm offensive - hence his reluctance to embark upon the recent unpleasantness over beef.

The only blemish in an otherwise spectacular career came during Sir Richard Scott's inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair.

It emerged that on 17 February 1992, when Wall was on loan to Downing Street, he deleted a key phrase in a letter from Major to an opposition politician denying that there had been any change in the arms exports guidelines.

The draft letter admitted that there had been “minor modifications” to the guidelines, but the inquiry discovered that Wall had crossed that out, thereby rendering himself vulnerable to the allegation that he had participated, with other ministers and officials, in an attempt to boost sales of defence-related equipment to Iraq without the parliament's knowledge.

Until then, Wall had been one of the foreign office's faceless men, pursuing a textbook career which included work as private secretary to four foreign secretaries.

Even the fame generated by a brush with scandal failed to stick. The arms-to-Iraq affair did not blight Wall's career and within a year he had made it to his first ambassadorial posting, becoming 'Our Man in Portugal'.

Wall could be forgiven for now recalling fondly that his time in Lisbon was well beyond the media spotlight, because fundamentally he is a behind-the-scenes operator and not a publicity seeker.

He would be far happier if he could get on with his Brussels job away from the headlines which have been thrust upon him by his current posting.

“While a lot of civil servants see themselves as indispensable, he actually looks as if he is,” someone once said of Wall.

The fact is, he is like his own name - solid, dependable, defensive. And you cannot see through him.