The Spanish Ambassador's Suitcase: Stories from the Diplomatic Bag - Hardcover

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After working in the Foreign Office then serving as a Conservative MP, Matthew Parris joined The Times in 1988. He writes two weekly columns for The Times and one for the Spectator, and in 2011 won the Best Columnist Award at the British Press awards. His acclaimed autobiography Chance Witness was published by Penguin in 2003. He is a frequent broadcaster.

Andrew Bryson is a radio journalist working in the BBC's Business and Economic Unit. He frequently works as a producer on Radio 4's Today programme and on Radio 5 Live.

Together they wrote the highly successful Parting Shots, published by Viking in 2010.

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Heard the one about the Spanish Ambassador who arrived in the scorching Saharan desert fully suited and with a mysteriously enormous suitcase? Or the horse they gave Prime Minister John Major in Turkmenistan - which hapless embassy officials had to rescue from the clutches of the Moscow railway? These and other 'funnies', as they are known in Whitehall, are featured in Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson's follow up to their collection of ambassadors' final despatches, Parting Shots.

For generations, despatches like these have allowed British diplomats to share a snigger into their starched sleeves with colleagues back in London. From the absurdities of diplomatic protocol to the ego-mania of foreign leaders, Her Majesty's official representatives saw it all, and wrote it down.

Some of these letters were written simply to entertain. But there was another kind of despatch, circulated widely across government, with a more serious purpose: the First Impression. After three months a new Ambassador was encouraged to put down on paper his first thoughts on his new posting. It was the perfect opportunity to wax lyrical or express disdain, to show off or profess lofty ignorance, but most of all to cast a fresh eye on some foreign field.

Drawn from Freedom of Information requests and from the National Archives, these despatches, together with some previously overlooked Valedictories, are the subject of a BBC Radio 4 series and make up another glorious volume of not so diplomatic writing. They throw a revealing light on how the British have viewed the world - and, unwittingly perhaps, on how the world has viewed the British.