Interrogator:

You appear to be quoting from the first chapter of your book. Please can you direct your reply to the question that was asked. How and when did you decide to recommend to the prime minister that he should become involved in the Yemen salmon project?

Peter Maxwell:

If you’d just let me answer in my own time, thank you very much, I was coming to that. You see, everyone has an off day. Everyone can get blindsided, sideswiped, no matter how good they are. That’s when I can add some value. That’s what I do. If the news is bad, I present it in the best possible light. If the news is very bad, I come up with a different story. The attention span of most of the media is about twenty minutes, and a new story, a new angle, normally tempts them to drop the bone you want them to drop, and look at the new bone you’re offering them. That’s off the record.

Interrogator:

I am afraid everything you say here is on the record. Please, can we proceed to discuss how you first became involved with the Yemen salmon project.

Peter Maxwell:

It was one of those bad news days you sometimes get. That was when the Yemen business first came up. I can’t remember what it was that had happened. I think someone had held a map upside down and bombed a hospital in Iran instead of a militants’ training camp in the Iraq desert. Not ideal from a presentational point of view, so I did what I usually do. I have a little email group of friends and right-minded people around the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and one or two other departments, so I sent out the usual ‘Anyone got a good news story for me?’ emails.

Usually what I get is stuff I have to work very hard at to turn into something I can use. You know, we have opened a new sewage treatment plant in south Basra, picture of a general standing by a ditch. The British Council has sent a group of morris dancers on tour in the Sunni Triangle. Hard work to sell that sort of story at a press conference-some of my colleagues in the trade are a touch cynical these days. But this story sold itself. Herbert Berkshire from the FCO rang me and asked, ‘What do you think of the idea of salmon fishing? In the Yemen?’

‘How’s that again?’ I said. I remember reaching for the Bartholomew’s School Atlas, which is never very far from my desk in these days of ethical foreign policy. We have got ethical in so many places I begin to wish I had not given up geography at school. I flip the pages, and the atlas more or less opens itself at the Middle East. Sure enough, there’s the Yemen, and sure enough it’s mostly coloured yellow and brown. ‘It’s desert,’ I said. ‘You won’t find many salmon there.’

I don’t know anything about salmon fishing. I like cricket, darts, football, salsa dancing, physical fitness stuff like that. Salmon fishing: isn’t that what old men in tweed caps and rubber trousers do in the rain in Scotland?

‘That’s the story,’ said Herbert. And he told me about Sheikh Muhammad from the Yemen. Herbert said that the sheikh had always been pro-British. He owned an estate in Scotland and had a power base in the Yemen that included a share of oil revenues. Money is a key driver in these situations. If there’s a pot of money somewhere in any project, you’ve cracked it almost before you start. Herbert told me that the sheikh had an obsession about fishing, in particular salmon fishing. He had a strange theory that fishing is a sport which has a calming and beneficial effect on people, and he wanted his own people in the Yemen to have the benefit of that. He actually believed that, said Herbert. I must say, it sounded like total crap to me but, who cared, it would make a good story. He wanted to spend a lot of money with UK fisheries scientists to work on a project to seed Yemeni watercourses with Scottish salmon. With live salmon, that is. He believed that if he spent enough money, he could create conditions in which salmon could be caught during the rainy season in the Yemen.

Herbert said that the sheikh had both the will and the money to make something happen. The sheikh wanted to spend the money funding a development project by some outfit within DEFRA called the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. I didn’t realise it still existed; I thought we had reallocated all its grant funding to a programme of building swimming pools in deprived ethnic-minority-type inner-city areas. I remember making a mental note to check that later. My view was, fish don’t vote. When would people get that simple point?

‘Herbert, this is going to fail. It has D for disaster written all over it.’

‘Think about it for a moment,’ said Herbert. He started to number his points and I could see him in my mind’s eye spreading the fingers of his left hand and then bending them over double with the forefinger of his right hand. It’s an irritating, schoolmaster-type thing which he does in meetings. ‘One: all the news coming out of the region has got worse again just now and it doesn’t make the government look good. This is a chance to get a picture on the front covers that does have the words ‘ Middle East ’ in the caption, and doesn’t have bodies in the picture. Two: we’ve only just repaired our diplomatic relations with the Yemen after recent terrorist incidents in which Yemeni groups have been involved. Here’s a chance to be constructive and open up a new, non-political dialogue with the Yemen. We can show water with fish swimming in it, in a desert country. It doesn’t matter whether it works or not. The point is, it can probably be made to look as if it works, even if only for five minutes. We put a few fish into a stream, take pictures, then move on.’

‘Good point, Herbert,’ I said.

‘Three: the president of the Yemen is not part of this, nor is his government; this is a private initiative. Your office, and the boss, can get involved or not, as you wish. FCO doesn’t need to be. Either your office can decide to support this, or it can decide not to, depending on how things stack up when you take a closer look. But it could just look very good if the PM could be seen to be promoting something scientific, something sporting, something cultural, like this. And there’s a terrific story about how Western ideas and science can transform the harsh desert environment and the lives of the people who live there. I think you ought to run it past the boss.’

The more I thought, the more I liked it. It was win-win. ‘Herbert, thank you for this suggestion. I like it. I’ll take it to the boss, as you suggest.’ How I wish I’d hung up on him, when he first said the words ‘salmon fishing’.

Interrogator:

So your initial interest in the salmon project was for purely political reasons?

Peter Maxwell:

Hey, politics is what I do. I wasn’t paid to think about fish; I was paid to think about what would make the boss look good. So, anyway, that is how it started. I wrote to the PM and the PM got it, immediately. He didn’t ask questions. He just said, ‘Go for it, Peter. Nice work,’ or something like that, and then I had to run with it. The first bit of press exposure, we were a bit off balance. I mean, something came out in the Yemen Observer. How am I meant to anticipate that? Then the International Herald Tribune picked the story up, and from there it got into the UK broadsheets, then the tabloids. So we had to get into the act, keep control of events, make sure the story spun our way. You saw the interview on breakfast TV, didn’t you? Now I’m very tired. I don’t want to answer any more questions today.

Interrogator:

For the record, I am now switching off the tape.