DC Confidential

by Christopher Meyer

Book Overview

Riveting and candid memoir of life behind the scenes as US Ambassador and Prime Minister's Press Secretary - a Sunday Times bestseller

Christopher Meyer was Ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003, during which time he was an eyewitness to and participant in the events following 9/11 and the preparations for the Iraq war. Never before has there been such a riveting and candid memoir of life behind the diplomatic scenes...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0753820919
• ISBN13: 9780753820919
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Phoenix
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The Grass is Greener on the Other Side of the Pond

DC Confidential is an `expose' of sorts, written by Britain's former ambassador to the United States, Sir Christopher Meyer. The book begins with insights into his personal life, mainly dealing with his early career and his wife. The unfortunate, painful and agonizing child custody battle of Ms. Laylle (later known as Sir Christopher Meyer's second wife, Catherine Meyers) with German courts is sad and heartbreaking. However, singling out only the German legal system doesn't sound fair and balanced because there are numerous similar cases like these also faced by parents and children on this side of the Atlantic every single day. In these kinds of legal battle, the greatest sufferers are the children, who are caught in the middle and whose side of the story is usually unheard. However, Sir Meyer deserves a great deal of credit in bringing the issue of child custody into the spotlight, which has increasingly become more of a power struggle between the legal system and parents, then about what is the best interest of the children. Child custody is a very vital and important social issue facing modern day societies and legal systems and it deserves our attention. The second and main part of the book deals mostly with his political career and the information he was privy to while he held his position. The book might have been controversial when first published, however, nowadays much of the information Meyer shares is common knowledge that solicits little reaction. However, some details Meyer presents are extremely informative about the foreign policy decision-making process. For instance, the passages on the Banana war between the Europe and the U.S., Scottish Cashmere tariff, and the Balkan conflict all have very insightful details from his insider perspective that were not given proper attention by the media. The book is written in a concise and informative manner. The author is pretty familiar with American popular culture recipe of sex, alcohol, violence and four letter words, which are all incorporated to some extent to make the book enticing for American readers. In other words, he demonstrates his familiarity with high profile people in business and government, their display of their success, power, glamour and money, and how Washington works outside of public awareness. Yes, the UK and U.S. have a shared culture, history and language. But I was amused to read how Christopher Meyer praised the U.S and criticized the United Kingdom's current cultural and policy trends. I wish in return, we as Americans would instead accept some of the United Kingdom's values, such as a practical approach to policy issues, humanistic values, and a problem-solving civil service. Despite the negative aspects of the book, I would heartily recommend this book to other interested in the human aspect of U.S. U.K foreign policy.

D C Confidences

An interesting insight into to the world of diplomacy and politics. Christopher Meyer's biting yet diplomatic comments on the behaviour of our leading politicians and their accolites, including our own Prime Minister and the President of USA, proved an absorbing read which I found difficult to put down!

A British View of the Inside of the American Presidency

This book has two strong points to recommend it. First, with the poor quality and lack of depth in modern news reporting you don't know the story until the books come out. Second, this book is written by a Briton who was closely associated with the Blair and Bush governments while the decision were being made regarding the war in Iraq. This is important because as a non-American Mr. Meyer doesn't have his own political axe to grind. He is neither a Bush hater nor a Bush lover who thinks that Bush can do no wrong. One critical issue that he addresses is the decision to invade Iraq. Most of the Bush haters seem to believe that the president came to office with the intent of a war in Iraq. Mr. Meyer says no, but the details are too complex to list in a short review like this one. All in all, this is a most interesting book that presents an outside view of the American presidential seen. It is well written, a fairly easy read, and seems fairly balanced.

THE INSIDER

Sir Christopher Meyer resigned as British ambassador in Washington just before the start of hostilities in Iraq. He has started a new career as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, but his frequent appearances on television since he left the diplomatic service have been almost exclusively in connexion with his privileged insights into the origins of the war. The title of the book is a slight misnomer - most of it is indeed about his time as ambassador to the USA, but the first few chapters are partly concerned with his early life and career and partly with a personal issue that burns him up, namely his second wife's grisly experiences with German justice in obtaining access to her children from her first marriage. In Britain the book has given rise to a good deal of comment for supposedly disparaging or even attacking prominent politicians, and I noticed that he had to appear before a parliamentary committee to respond to such points. These allegations are simply balderdash, and the politicians concerned have no business being so thin skinned in my own opinion. John Prescott's malapropisms are the stuff of legend, and the ones that Meyer records are not only relevant but vintage efforts too. They make Prescott look ridiculous, but nowhere near as ridiculous as his own over-reaction did. In any case Meyer's overall assessment of Prescott is fair and far from unfavourable, and he is not afraid to tell a similar story about himself - after three years of shuffling along presentation-lines he was overcome with a kind of catatonic amnesia, forgot his wife's name and introduced her to the puzzled grandees by various alternatives including `Christopher'. As for the other seemingly contentious matters, I find it difficult to imagine that even Jack Straw himself supposes he has very many groupies, and to find anything sensational about an account of seeing John Major partly dressed sets the qualifying-bar for sensation as low as I can ever recall. In fact the book seems to me conspicuously fair-minded in general. A British civil servant is required to be professionally neutral, but even when I knew him 40 years ago I never recall Christopher showing any particular political inclination. He has a strong streak of irreverence, but he is not a committed scoffer either. He has a fairly traditional sense of awe in respect of Churchill for instance, he was obviously impressed with Mrs Thatcher, and Blair's strongest opponents would be hard put to it to deny that he is what Meyer finds him to be - a bit of a genius in some ways. The style of writing is light and informal, at least until we get to the really serious chapter entitled `War'. It is entirely free of the portentousness that one tends to associate with Whitehall mandarins called Sir Hector this and Sir Herbert that, but there was a time when no senior civil servant would have used `aftermath' to mean after-effect or `cataclysmic' to mean disastrous, just as there was a time when no eminent