POLITICS

the boys on the

bongo bus

John Dickie

John Libbey Media, #15

LET me start by declaring an interest. Like John Dickie, although for far less time, I was one of the boys on the Bongo Bus. That was the name given by Eileen Gallagher, PA to the head of news in the Foreign Office, to the mini-bus provided by the South Koreans for the British press on one of Geoffrey Howe's visits there. It was a distinctly ramshackle affair clearly designed for use by rather short people.

When the Foreign Secretary arrives on an official visit, he and his entourage leave the airport in

limousines. Not the press. They come at the end of the cavalcade in whatever mini-bus is available from the Embassy pool or the local Foreign Ministry. Eileen, urged to get into one of the posh cars, refused. ''I'm sticking with the boys on the Bongo Bus,'' she declared.

Thereafter the British diplomatic press travelled in Bongo Buses the world over.

John Dickie started his travels with Foreign Secretaries in 1966 going to Moscow with George Brown. Thirty years and nine Foreign Secretaries later he retired, the only diplomatic correspondent to have gone with everyone up to

Douglas Hurd on all their travels.

If it is insight and inside information that is needed, John has it in abundance. On my first trip to India with Geoffrey Howe 10 years ago I came back full of enthusiasm and wrote about the hacks and the way they coped, only to be sternly rebuked by the Aged Glaswegian, as John likes to refer to himself. ''We do not write about ourselves,'' he chided. Diplomatic relations were temporarily severed, but happily peace was declared and thereafter he proved a fine travelling companion and mentor. John has now sinned with a vengeance in a book which informs while it entertains.

Having been in the trade so long, he had met pretty well every ambassador or high commissioner at less exalted stages of their careers, sometimes when they did a stint in the FO news department, at others when they were manning various FO regional desks, so his access to the various sub-bosses we encountered travelling with The Boss, as the Foreign Secretary is called, was unique. He knew better than probably anyone else when they were lying for Britain, which diplomats do as a matter of course.

The result is a hugely entertaining account of a unique travelling circus whose days, if they are not over, are certainly numbered. British Foreign Secretaries are no longer the powers in the world they used to be, and media interest in their travels has virtually disappeared. The press, by the way, do not travel for free. We pay for our flight on the RAF VC10, the preferred means of transport, and for everything else - hotels, meals and the wretched Bongo Buses. The last time I was on one was in Hebron last year when we were stoned by a Palestinian, whose rock shattered the windscreen. Life on the Bongo Bus has its hazards.

The book opens on a high note. Travel with George Brown was hair- raising to say the least. One of the first things his principal private secretary did was to take the Ambassador aside and warn him that, if he did not already know it, the man was an alcoholic who, in the next 48 hours, would ''insult you, your wife and probably everyone else on the Embassy staff''.

At the height of the Rhodesian independence crisis, Brown summoned an early evening lobby meeting and declared we were at war with Ian Smith, a gaffe it took all the efforts of the Commonwealth Secretrary, George Thomson, to retrieve. Brown was, of course, drunk as a skunk. But it was in the evening.

In the mornings he was fine, as those who worked for him soon realised. John's tale of the night train to Moscow with Brown is the sort that do not get into print, let alone into ambassadorial memoirs, but is part of the whole story. In fact

that is what this book does. It fills in the gaps.

The relationship between the media and diplomats is a tricky one, different from that between the lobby and Downing Street. The number 10 spokesman is a politicised post. The head of news department is a high-flier on his way up, there to protect Britain's interests. The press is the enemy as far as the Foreign Office is concerned. Downing Street may collude with lobby correspondents; the same does not happen in King Charles Street.

A lot depends on who is Foreign Secretary. Alec Douglas-Home was clearly a joy to travel with, David Own hell in a handcart, and Lord Carrington a wonderfully urbane leader of the pack. Dickie reserves his accolade for Sir Geoffrey Howe, with good reason. Part of Howe's success was due to his head of news, Christopher Meyer, who went on to serve at number 10 and is now Ambassador to Germany. He provided Howe, not a natural word-spinner, with what he called ''a scintillating cornucopia of headline phrases'' which helped to sell visits as newsworthy.

Rare for a diplomat, Meyer understood that just being somewhere was not in itself enough to ensure that the Foreign Secretary's travels got reported back home. Howe also believed that as well as meeting his hosts he should see something of the country, so slotted in was a rest day for sightseeing. One of the best was in Djibouti when we were taken by yacht to an island beach resort, and then transferred to shore in inflatable rubber boats supplied to the regime's navy by Britain. On the way back, time being short, the boats, overloaded with the cream of the FO, the pride of Fleet Street and The Herald, started to sink. The stories in this book, part of the overall picture, the stuff of history, have been placed in the context of the times and illumine our understanding of the 10 men who were the reason for Dickie's travels.