Parting Shots

Description

Up till 2006, a British Ambassador quitting his post abroad would write a valedictory despatch circulated widely across government, from other far-flung members of the service to the Prime Minister himself. This was the parting shot, the opportunity to offer a personal view of the country he was leaving- the alcoholic intake of its population, the corruption of its ministers, the state of the capital's drains, or the impossibility of getting embassy staff to clean British guests' shoes - whatever he or she wanted to get off their chest. Often funny, frequently astute and almost always gloriously non-politically correct, these parting shots shed light on Britian's place in the world, and reveal the curious cocktail of priviledge and privation which make up the life of an ambassador abroad. 'There is, I fear, no question but that the average Nicaraguan is one of the most dishonest, unreliable, violent and alcholic of the Latin Americans' Roger Pinsent, Managua, 1967 'The detention of the Pinochet made life in Chile unusually interesting... I have never received quite so many death threats' Dame Glynne Evans, Lisbon, 2004

Matthew Parris had a short career in the Foreign Office where one of his tasks was to distribute incoming valedictory despatches. He was a Conservative MP from 1979 to 1986, since when he has worked as a journalist. He won the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and his acclaimed autobiography Chance Witness was published by Penguin in 2002. He divides his time between Derbyshire (where his old constituency was situated) and east London. Andrew Bryson is a radio journalist working in the BBC's Business and Economics Unit. He lives in Surrey.