Sherard Cowper-Coles (Classics, 1973)

Sherard Cowper-Coles is Group Head of Government Affairs for the HSBC banking group. He also chairs the Financial Inclusion Commission and the Trust that is bringing Sir John Soane’s country house, Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, back to life. After Hertford, where he read Classics, he spent over 30 years in the Diplomatic Service, ending up as Ambassador successively to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. He has written two books – ‘Cables from Kabul’ and ‘Ever the Diplomat’. He is an Honorary Fellow of the College.

I didn’t choose Hertford, but Hertford chose me, in the sense that Hertford was short of a classical scholar, and my headmaster did a deal behind my back for me to go there, even though I had applied to Worcester. It could not have turned out better, and I couldn’t have been happier.

There were some misgivings. On the day I arrived at Hertford, the Dean, Roy Stuart, had put a note on the College noticeboard headed simply “VOMIT”, under which he had typed: “I wish to see less of this around College in future”.

But things soon picked up. Hertford then was small, poor, friendly, and at the start of a long improvement driven by three wise policies: first, our efforts to recruit bright students from schools, many in the north, who had never send pupils to Oxbridge; second, the admission of women, in October 1974, under the “Jesus Plan”, which immediately made the College more civilised, more interesting, more intelligent, and more normal – with less vomit; and, third, the then Principal, Geoffrey Warnock, and investment bursar, Roger van Noorden, transformed the College’s finances, by securing transfers from the richer colleges, and by wise investments. Plus the food, and then the accommodation, gradually improved.

The best thing about Classics, or so I thought, was three summer terms in Oxford without a public exam. Oxford went completely to my head. I tried almost everything, at least once, and met so many people I had never met, the children of people ranging, literally, from dukes to dustmen. Only in my last couple of years did I really work, and, thanks mainly to my tutor, Stephanie West, had a distant sighting of what academic excellence could be.

When it came to the afterlife, I always knew that, if I could pass the exams, I would love the Foreign Office, and so it proved. But, as an insurance policy, I applied to banks and to be a barrister. The Bank of England offered both Theresa May and me jobs in 1977: she took it, while I headed to Whitehall.

I then spent more than 30 very happy years in the Foreign Office. I was offered a choice of learning Arabic, Chinese or Japanese, and chose Arabic, out of vanity and ambition, because I thought I could be ambassador in more countries. I was sent to the famous Foreign Office Arabic school above Beirut, which Nasser had called the “British spy school”. But we were evacuated from there, as the Lebanese Civil War hotted up again, and I spent the rest of my time learning Arabic in London, and then Syria and finally living with an Egyptian family in Alexandria. Postings as a political officer in Cairo, Washington and Paris followed, interspersed with jobs in London as the Foreign Office speechwriter, private secretary to the head of the Foreign Office, and head of the Hong Kong department in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong, on 30 June 1997, almost exactly 20 years ago. Then, in 1999, I was pulled out early from a dream posting to Paris, to work as head of the office for the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. He was a difficult, but talented, man, of whom I became very fond. And I hugely admired his courage and intellect. I then learnt Hebrew, and went as Ambassador to Israel during the second Palestinian intifada – a difficult but professionally very interesting time. To my surprise, I was then sent to Saudi Arabia, for four years as Ambassador during a particularly unpleasant Al Qaeda campaign, during which the BBC journalist Frank Gardner was badly wounded and his cameraman killed. My three final jobs all related to Afghanistan – a beautiful country, whose people had suffered and still suffer terribly, from too much foreign intervention for too long. I was so pleased that Brad Pitt, who stars in the forthcoming satirical movie War Machine about the misguided US intervention in Afghanistan, read my book about it, and came to see me in London for a briefing.

When in 2002 a letter reached me in Israel from the then Principal, Walter Bodmer, saying that I had been elected to an Honorary Fellowship, I thought it was a wind-up. But it wasn’t, and I am so glad, because it has enabled me in a small way to start repaying my debt to an institution where I spent four of the happiest, and most productive and stimulating, years of my life.