And then there was my statistical plan — I’m warned forever against the reliability of statistics … When I was in Rhodes I had to run 3 newspapers, an English daily for the army, and an Italian daily for the Italian community and a little Turkish one. And I started a Greek one called “Kronos” which I believe is still going on, which was quite pleasant and had a little literary corner which the English thought was highly untrustworthy. Then I received my annual reports. My agent said the sales on a small island called Micronesium (one of the Dodecanse group), it’s so tiny that it really hasn’t got a name, was buying 400 copies of this newspaper. This was a bit of a puzzle. We were printing 5,000-10,000 copies, but 400! The total inhabitants of that island struck me as around 25. I couldn’t understand why each man was reading my paper so often. I knew it was a good paper, I was putting my back into it, it was excellent stuff, but I didn’t see why they would keep buying extra copies just to reread the same things? So I thought this merited a trip, and I got the navy to ship me out in a corvette and I went ashore. I was met as though I was a sort of Henderson the Rain King. And only two people on the island read, the schoolmaster and the priest, and the others were all peasants. I said, “Of course, you read the news to them.” They said yes. I said, “Where in the hell do these other 385 copies go then?” He said, “What a godsend, we use them to wrap fish. You know I can’t tell you how much they mean to us.” The whole of this little fishing industry was based on my journalism. It’s a very salutory thought when you think statistically to remember that sort of thing because its puts you in your place. Don’t ever trust statistics — even your own sales. They are really wrapping fish in your work.
Well, the great curse of diplomacy is, I think, national days. A great horror, particularly in peace time, because everyone has to have a national day birthday party and everybody has to go for fear of offending the Israelis, offending the Arabs, offending somebody, so you don’t dare to offend somebody and so spend the entire time drinking yourself insensible at parties out of sheer depression. And that I think is a great curse. But from the point of view of an English diplomat the real curse is paper games because, as you know, the English have nothing whatsoever to say to each other but they’re forced to entertain each other because it’s supposed to promote morale. Actually, it used to drive my morale right down to rock bottom. You simply had to go; you couldn’t refuse anybody senior to you — my head of chancery, my oriental counselor, my ambassador. As they didn’t have much to say we used to sit and play “consequences” all evening with paper and pencil — these long long intellectual evenings became absolutely burnt into my memory. And even now I often awake screaming in the night playing a paper game with a British Dip.
The bad faith and secrecy have been very well done by Compton McKenzie in his five books which analyse the situation in Athens during the first world war because in every country you have a divided optic on any given topic and it’s amusing, exciting, and sometimes a tiny bit dangerous to try to find out exactly what’s eating them and then convey that back. But our methods of spying nowadays are so ludicrous. Everything is really known technologically so that I should suppose that it won’t be long now before, if you want to know what’s going on in the Kremlin you could throw a switch somewhere in Pomona and listen to it. Which would be a great relief. A few jobs would be lost but in fact it would be a great relief because nothing very much is going on in the Kremlin that isn’t going on just in this room. It’s an attempt to bolster an idiocy, to blow it up as something important when it really isn’t important at all. Nevertheless, one does have some exciting times. We had once an illustration which struck me as useful. There is one absolutely cardinal thing that the British are supreme masters of, and that is to say nothing and look idiotic. I’m not joking. Several times, just by not saying anything and not doing anything, people don’t believe it’s true. They come to you panicky with some bit of information such as the German’s are 10 kilometers away, and you say, “Are they?” And it’s clear that you wouldn’t be in that complacent state if they were. So by not doing anything sometimes you can get away with murder. There is one particular example: in one of the most brilliant Italian feats during the war, three men in a baby submarine — commandos — came in and stuck plastic on the bottom of the biggest battleship we had at the moment in Alexandria harbour, the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet. In the middle of the night there was a dull explosion and the thing went down about 2 or 3 feet, but it stayed at anchor. As press attaché, they rang me up and said, “Do you know what’s happened? We’ve caught these men but they’ve blown the whole bottom out of this ship.” And of course these ships were surveyed all the time by the Germans by air making their calculations about the strength of the Mediterranean fleet in case of a fight at Oran or whatever. So it was really rather critical. They suggested that, “The best thing was to pretend that nothing has happened, old boy.” It seemed to me quite a big pretend, but I said, “Okay, yes. We don’t do anything.” He said, “Absolutely nothing. Don’t mention it.” But though the explosion was very badly muffled the whole town felt it. It was like an earthquake. But it was muffled by the water and it was so deep down below, that, though the ship had subsided slightly and was absolutely out of action, it hadn’t moved. So we just went around with what, in technical terms in my profession, is known as an operation poe-face — a chamberpot expression — for about five days. Strangely enough the event wasn’t picked up by the press, nor by anybody, and that ship lay there for nearly five months before the enemy realised that it had the bottom blown completely out of if. A very useful thing, silence.