Current Affairs: Sir Christopher Meyer spent 36 years in the British diplomatic service. He was ambassador in Washington DC for his last five and a half years and before that he had been, inter alia, press secretary to prime minister John Major and foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe. Irish officials remember him as a "dacent" interlocutor.
His memoirs have been roundly condemned by London's great and good. He has been accused of disloyalty, vanity, financial greed and breach of trust. His critics say he has damaged the already threatened relationship between politicians and civil servants.
DC Confidential does not let a single state secret out of the bag. There are written guidelines covering the publication of memoirs by British diplomats and this book went through the full and proper process under the rules. It was submitted to the cabinet office and the foreign office was consulted. The book was assessed "for harm to national security, international relations or confidential relations with government and no changes were sought". The political skeletons remain firmly locked in the cupboard. We learn nothing new about the background to the war in Iraq or the response to 9/11. We get no inkling about Britain's current or longterm thinking about Northern Ireland. Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed and will have to await the opening of official archives in 30 years' time.
The book may not give us state secrets but it does give us some interesting analysis and commentary on both American and British politics. Above all, it is an entertaining read and for that we must thank Lady Meyer, whose legs caught Sir Christopher's attention when she went to see him on business a few months before his appointment to the US (incidentally, she appears, legs and all, in 12 of the photographs in the book.) They married the day before their arrival in Washington and, uninhibited by any previous experience of diplomacy, she brought the role of an ambassador's wife to the limit of what is traditional, even in the American capital. Her part in the writing of the book, happily, breaches the limit.
When Lady Meyer was typing the first draft of the book, she told her husband that it was boring and a bit dry. She suggested that he inject "that female thing of painting a picture and talking about emotions". The result is the most publicised book of the season. It has been debated in the Commons and the Lords and has been written about in the political pages in London and Washington. It may even result in the rewriting of the official guidelines for diplomatic memoirs. Hopefully, it will help to clear the mortgage and pay the Meyers' expensive divorce bills from their previous marriages.
Looked at from this side of the Irish Sea, the revelations in the book are mild. Who cares that heads of government "have an unhappy relationship with clothes", that some ministers may be badly tongue-tied when they meet their foreign opposite numbers or that others may be pygmies on the international stage? British readers appear to be shocked by the revelation that a prime minister, John Major, was briefed in the marital bedroom in his shirt-tails while his wife lay demurely in the bed drinking tea and reading the Times. Irish diplomats have had to cope with doing the briefing over a stronger brew and before the politician had yet put his shirt on. They probably had to listen at the same time to a counter-briefing from the person in the bed. And the bed may not always have been the marital bed.
Surely politicians should be sufficiently thick-skinned to live with this. After all, they too write memoirs, usually with greater frequency than civil servants. To name but a few, Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam and Clare Short are among Meyer's political generation in Britain who have already put pen to paper. Cherie Blair's Downing Street book even has a reference to him.
In Ireland, we have seen the publication of many political memoirs, including those by Garret FitzGerald, Brian Lenihan, Gemma Hussey, Barry Desmond, Ruairi Quinn, Austin Currie, Brian Faulkner, Terence O'Neill and Padraic Faulkner. Even the Provisionals have got in on the act, notably with books from Seán Mac Stiofáin and Gerry Adams. Irish civil servants have been less prolific, though there have been a smaller number of excellent memoirs, including James Deeny's account of his time as chief medical officer, León Ó Broin's Just like Yesterday and Sean O'Connor's very political analysis of his time in the educational scene.
Somewhat surprisingly, Irish diplomats have been quieter, though this may be about to change. A small awkward squad from Iveagh House, including Charles Bewley, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Eamon Delaney, has shown that it is possible to paint in the bits that official papers do not normally reach.
For Irish readers, DC Confidential has some specific points of interest. Sir Christopher gives high marks to Irish diplomacy in Washington. His analysis of US politics concludes that only the governments of Israel, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Ireland have, consistently over recent years, shown the ability significantly to influence the direction of US foreign policy.
There are many other references to Ireland and indeed there is a separate chapter on the Northern Ireland fallout in Washington, where Meyer reports that Peter Mandelson was lost and Mo Mowlam was very much at home. What is clear is that the carefully nurtured seeds sown in the 1970s by the "four horsemen", Irish-American politicians Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, Edward Kennedy, Hugh Carey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have borne fruit in abundance. London is now aware that Northern Ireland is a Washington issue and reacts accordingly.
All in all, DC Confidential is an entertaining and informative read. It may not spill the official secrets but it does provide plenty of colour. In an era of selective leaking of documents and the operation of freedom of information legislation, official memoranda, telegrams and other documents have become somewhat bland and colourless. Historians will find this book a useful addition to the archive material.
They and we have reason to be grateful for Lady Meyer's legs.
Sean Donlon is chancellor of the University of Limerick and a former Irish ambassador to the US
DC Confidential By Sir Christopher Meyer Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 301pp. £20