Until 2006, a British ambassador leaving his post would write a valedictory despatch to be circulated among select readers in the British government. These “parting shots” tended to be appallingly frank, combining the diplomat’s real feelings about the nation he was leaving with his often wounded resentment at the indifference of his own government:

• Argentina: “All I knew of Argentines before coming here was that they were generally disliked by all other Latin Americans as unduly pretentious, snobbish upstarts. …. The per capita outlay on deodorants in the Argentine is the highest in the world.”
• Finland: “It could plausibly be argued that it is a misfortune for anybody but a Finn to spend three years in Finland, as I have just done. … Finland is flat, freezing, and far from the pulsating centres of European life.”
• Uruguay: “After living now for over two years among people who call themselves Orientals and who seem to have inherited nearly all the faults and none of the virtues of Spain (though they have many minor virtues of their own), I look forward to returning to what I conceive to be, at least by contrast, the speed and efficiency of my own country.”
• Saudi Arabia: “It is a great tragedy that, with all the world’s needs, Providence should have concentrated so much of a vital resource and so much wealth in the hands of people who need it so little and are so socially irresponsible about the use of it.”
• Thailand: “Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested by thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city remain flooded for weeks on end; and the whole set in a flat mournful plain without even a hillock in sight for 100 miles in any direction: this is Bangkok, the vaunted Venice of the East.”

Matthew Parris, who published a whole collection of these in 2010, explains: “Beyond retirement there can be no reprisals.”