Few high-flying Foreign Office diplomats take a year’s sabbatical in mid-career to study science. Still fewer make their study central to a career which has reached the highest levels of government service. One man who has accomplished all this is Sir Crispin Tickell – until autumn 1990 the British ambassador to the UN, credited with the curious ‘greening’ of Margaret Thatcher’s later years in office, and now warden of Green College, Oxford.
Tickell made his foray into science in 1976. He took the 12 months off after helping to mastermind Britain’s entry into Europe, and after three years as the Foreign Office’s top man in charge of NATO and arms reduction talks. He began the year in Boston, studying astronomy at Harvard and meteorology at MIT; he ended it giving a series of lectures at both institutions on the links between politics and climate change, later turning them into a book, Climate Change and World Affairs. ‘I found I was virtually the first in the field,’ recalls Tickell. ‘I read the entire literature on climate change in half a term, and there was nothing on the policy implications.’ No other book on the subject appeared for more than a decade. Tickell’s volume is still being sold, with a new edition out soon.
Choosing this topic was remarkably prescient – and perhaps a choice that only an historian steeped in politics and with a thirst for science could have made. What did the mandarins think of one of their best and brightest delving into science? ‘I was surprised at the FO’s tolerance of my eccentricities,’ Tickell recalls. He seems always to have stood slightly apart, however. ‘I had always been interested in the relationship between science and politics, and in long-term issues.’ Years before, he had been the first member of the Foreign Office planning staff and was joint secretary to a Cabinet Office ‘committee on the future’, set up in 1963 in the panicky atmosphere which followed Suez and the Cuban missile crisis.
Advertisement
Tickell first came to public notice much later, during the delicate negotiations that followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. At that time, the final months of his diplomatic career, he was Britain’s unusually visible ambassador to the UN, a familiar face on the nation’s television screens during the crisis. Surprisingly perhaps, he sets far greater store by less public work he was involved in during his time at the UN between 1987 and 1990: that of fanning international concern about the greenhouse effect and other global environmental perils.
During his spell in New York at the UN’s HQ he made frequent visits home to Britain, briefing Margaret Thatcher and ultimately persuading her to embrace the green cause. He provided the encouragement for her memorable ‘green speech’ to the Royal Society in 1988. In contrast to the slightly self-effacing manner adopted by many diplomats, Tickell unashamedly accepts the credit for ‘the greening of Thatcher’: he is not afraid to appear pleased with his work.
He has reason to be happy with his adoption – by luck or design – of the greenhouse issue as long ago as the mid-1970s, when most climatologists were more worried about a coming ice age than global warming. With hindsight, this choice appears part of a seamless piece of long-term diplomacy on his part; certainly, it is how he likes to tell it now. If this is so, the endgame will surely come in June this year in the shape of the UN’s Earth Summit meeting in Rio, where a convention on climate change is expected to be signed.
Tickell explains with a smile how it was that he, through long years when nobody else was interested, began to put the greenhouse effect on the international political agenda. The long march began a decade before the American drought of 1988 brought global warming to global attention, and several years before even scientists began to send a coherent signal to policy-makers that global warming was for real.
After returning from Harvard in 1977, Tickell became ‘chef de cabinet’ with Roy Jenkins, who was president of the European Commission. ‘In Brussels I began the Community climate research programme,’ he recalls. ‘And I got climate onto the agenda of the G7 summits in 1979 and 1980.’ It was never headline-grabbing stuff, he agrees, but ‘the long softening-up process had begun’.
After Brussels, he became our man in Mexico, on friendly terms with Margaret Thatcher since the evening when they sat together through dinner as an earthquake hit Mexico City. Back at the Foreign Office a year later he was her diplomatic guide – ‘sherpa’, in Foreign Office slang – at the summit of the ‘group of seven’ richest industrial nations in London in 1984. ‘We took an important environment initiative at that meeting, asking environment ministers to prepare plans on global issues, and climate was one of the main items.’
After that, he headed the Overseas Development Administration, the aid arm of the British government, where he tried to persuade countries asking for aid to clean up their environment first. ‘We were worried about Indian opencast mining,’ he recalls, ‘and we gave technical assistance on environ-mental concerns like forestry.’ The green reputation that a then rising junior minister, Chris Patten, gained under Tickell’s tutelage at the ODA, thrust him into the Cabinet as environment secretary.
But the climax to Tickell’s green diplomacy came when he reached the UN. He arrived in New York in 1987, just as the Brundtland Commission – a body of experts set up by the General Assembly and chaired by former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, delivered a report to the UN General Assembly, called Our Common Future. This bluntly told the world’s leaders that they could not go on destroying natural resources and polluting the atmosphere and oceans without increasingly severe consequences, such as spreading deserts, acid rain, soil erosion – and global warming.
Here was Tickell’s chance to put the climate question at the top of the agenda. He cajoled the UN into a series of resolutions that triggered negotiations on a convention on climate change. And he promoted the idea that the UN should hold an Earth Summit, 20 years after the Stockholm Environment Conference of 1972.
‘I was responsible for carrying the conference idea forward,’ he says. ‘I set up a ginger group on the environment, which met at the British Mission office. We invited ambassadors from a few key nations to start with, but more and more people wanted to be asked. The idea was infectious and our group became quite influential.’
The key year for Tickell’s environmental diplomacy was 1989, in both London and New York. In Britain the Green Party polled 15 per cent of the vote in European elections. And a shocked Margaret Thatcher, egged on by Tickell, called a seminar at Downing Street on the environment. ‘She assembled most of the Cabinet and just told them to listen,’ Tickell says. The main speakers were Tom Wigley, who runs the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and Tickell. Other participants ranged from Lord Marshall, then head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, to James Lovelock, environmental scientist and inventor of the Gaia hypothesis.
The following week, Tickell returned to New York with Thatcher in tow. There – prompted, it is rumoured, by a whisper from Tickell that Mikhail Gorbachev was planning a ‘green speech’ – she delivered a headline-grabbing speech on the need to pass on to future generations a planet as habitable as the one we inherited. ‘This was an influential speech,’ says Tickell. It was delivered, with George Bush newly installed in the White House, when Thatcher was at the height of her international influence. ‘The US followed with its own declaration by the end of the week,’ he says.
But the role of the US in throwing a spanner into the diplomatic works is a sore point with Tickell. He would never quite say so, but the presence ever since 1982 of right-wing Republicans in the White House has stymied many of his green initiatives. Certainly it is for the US that Tickell saves his least diplomatic language.
His run-in with Republicans began when he was in charge of the British aid programme. He wanted to increase international aid for population control in the Third World – an issue which he regards as even more important than the greenhouse effect. But the US was in the grip of anti-abortion fever. Just as a big UN population conference was taking place in Mexico City, Ronald Reagan very publicly announced the end of government funding for innocuous agencies such as the UN Fund for Population Affairs and the International Planned Parenthood Fund. ‘It was a scandalous episode,’ says Tickell. ‘They said the money was used for abortion. But when their own investigations showed that it wasn’t, they persisted with the boycott. Bush still hasn’t the guts to put the money back.’
Now Tickell believes that the US is in danger of torpedoing negotiations on a convention to curb greenhouse gases. Last July, he chaired a week-long meeting of top international officials and politicians at the Aspen Institute in Colorado to discuss the climate talks and the Earth Summit meeting. Afterwards he said: ‘It has been painful to attend (such) meetings where the rich countries think this is a Third World problem. Unless the rich countries, especially the US, take a lead, nothing will happen in Rio.’
Since then, Tickell has taken to denouncing the US government’s attitude to the global environment in public. He fears, not without reason, that the US is about to wipe out 15 years of his diplomacy. ‘The biggest single problem today,’ he told a conference in London, ‘is the attitude of the US. The industrial nations are the principal cause of most environmental problems . . . But they have not shown themselves able to come forward and admit it.’
Now, with talks deadlocked on the climate convention, he muses: ‘George Bush said he wanted to be the president for the environment. But in an election year he will want to be president for big business, which is running scared of things like carbon taxes. Their fear is quite unnecessary, of course. The taxes would allow them to develop new industries in cleanup technologies, but they don’t see it.’
His diplomatic strategy is straightforward, its efficacy borne out by his career. ‘You get people’s minds hooked on an idea, and then you push. But you mustn’t be in a hurry.’ Only the US government seems to have tried his patience to its limits. Even here he must still tread with care: his new employer, and benefactor of Green College, Oxford, is Cecil Green, the 91-year-old British-born head of Texas Instruments in the US.
While burning his bridges with the US government, Tickell is sticking close to John Major, insisting that Britain is ‘nothing like as bad as the US’ on environmental policy. He is also finding new allies. ‘I’m in touch with the Chinese,’ he says. ‘They are serious people. They have written some good scientific papers on the greenhouse effect. For the Chinese, global warming could be horrendous. A slight switch in the monsoon could cause disaster.’ China has set up an International Council of Environment and Development. Its first meeting is in Beijing in April, with Tickell as a member: the mandarin meets the Mandarins.
Despite almost 40 years in the service of the British government, Tickell is still willing to look into the abyss, as on that Cabinet ‘future’ committee nearly 30 years ago. He jumps from the scientific to the political, and to the visionary with rare ease.
He began a public lecture at the British Association last August thus: ‘Last week, I was in southwest France. We dined in the open air by the light of two candles under the immensity of the Milky Way. I was reminded of the words of Jacques Soustelle when he referred to the movement of human history through a night in which people carrying little lamps like fireflies marched from age to age towards an unknown destiny. Where are we going? Is anyone leading us? What is in the dark around?’
Last December he ended a speech to a conference of top American chemical companies by bemoaning human society as ‘hooked on progress’ and calling for civilisation to take on a ‘steadier state in which our species can accommodate change instead of being endangered, damaged or destroyed by it’. Another lecture, on biodiversity, ended with a long quote from a 19th-century letter by an American Indian chief to the US president on the holiness of natural things.
At an age when many take refuge from younger, faster minds in pedantry and counselling caution, Tickell still offers fire. I asked him about the fears that many scientists have about speaking out on environmental issues where there is still uncertainty, and about meddling in policy issues. Such fears occupied a lot of the time at the ‘science summit’ in Vienna last December, where scientists discussed how they could contribute to the Earth Summit.
Tickell has little time for such niceties. ‘ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´s should be much braver,’ he says. ‘I think this ethics argument – should they speak or shouldn’t they – is a lot of crap. ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´s cannot promise certainty any more than economists can when they call for changes in taxes or interest rates. Uncertainty is part of the human condition.’ Caution, in any case, may in reality be recklessness. ‘We must always look at the cost of doing nothing,’ he says.
There is a real risk, Tickell fears, that the Earth Summit may end in acrimony, setting back environmental diplomacy many years. But while younger environmentalists breathe cynicism about the summit, Tickell, who has invested so much in its success, still evokes an idealism.
The consumate diplomat says that above all he hopes to avoid diplomatic fudge at the summit. He wants triumph or disaster. ‘The next best thing after a resounding success,’ he says, ‘would be a great failure. One that is recognised as such. At least if we know we have failed, we will know that we will have to come back again – because the problems will only get worse.’
