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cooler weather, and to increase money spent on bad weather precautions. Small but useful items like this were becoming apparent every day and led to a great increase in the amount of paperwork. Unfortunately, because of the number of them,quite a few got lost in the mounds of red boxes - which meant that when Ministers asked “Why wasn’t I told this?”,  their Sir Humphrey was allowed to respond - with considerable glee - that the Minister had been informed.
     
    However, things were returning to a more even keel - we had agreed the legislation for the next few months, and I was looking for some time to settle down. I was then shocked by the offer made to me by the PM on the Wednesday - someone needed to go to France, and it needed to be someone high-level. She didn’t want to send David, who was having a lot of problems with what we then still called the old ambassadors and needed to be here, but someone who spoke good French. She knew I spoke good French, and she knew that I had some connections with Royalty and how to behave at court - and, to boot, I was a Catholic. Would I go to Versailles? Well, despite the fearsome number of “shots” I would need, and a 24-hour quarantine on my return, I could hardly say no - the idea of actually seeing the Court of Louis XV was far, far too enticing. So - after being jabbed for everything under the sun, given enough pills to take until I rattled and 24 hours for everything to take effect - off we went. I had a pile of briefing notes, a personal letter from the Queen, a new ambassador and three staff, three drivers and a couple of handy looking chaps from the Diplomatic Protection Squad. I learnt later that the drivers were all from the Army and had guns as well.
     
    We travelled in two newish land rovers with the Royal crest on the side and with a four-wheel-drive truck which carried “the bare essentials for an embassy”, all flying large Union Flags - which, of course, the French didn’t recognise. Of course, they were nowhere near even the bare essentials, but we really didn’t know that at the time; there was a lot of learning for the FO to do in that time, it had been a while since we had really had to fully supply embassies with everything. Hardship posting had used to mean the likes of Ulan Bator or Dakar - not Paris, Copenhagen or Berlin. It was all quite exciting really; we rolled off the ship onto a beach with a number of very scared looking Frenchmen in attendance and Sir Gordon [32] shouting  “Je suis l’ancien ambassadeur du Royaume-Uni”  at anyone who came in range. It sort of worked, and we proceeded remarkably slowly towards Paris; even with four-wheel drive - and with cushions - it was still not a wonderfully comfortable journey and took several hours, partly because of the roads and partly because of the crowds of locals that gathered to look at our little convoy. It was also rather slow because we were several times stopped by officials - with no telephones, no radio and not even a carrier pigeon, we were the fastest method of communication. By the end of the journey, I was convinced that the helicopter would be the way forward for diplomatic travel for a few years; sadly that was not generally to be, except in extremis - the Treasury deeming it to be too expensive, the land rover convoy was the future for the FO for many years. However, despite this slow progress and some worries about a couple of bridges, we arrived at the British Embassy in Paris by the early afternoon.
     
    The embassy itself was in a rather grand house in Paris; it had some grounds, it had relatively light airy rooms and it had, for the time, a considerable staff of five plus a similar number of servants. When you compared that to a modern embassy, you will understand why the FO was able to make so many savings rather easily and why the Diplomatic Corps has shrunk somewhat. The then-Ambassador Horatio Walpole was understandably rather dubious about us at first, but