Lucky Dip

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After an improbable beginning, Richard Thomas’s diplomatic career took him to some unlikely places, like Bhutan where his motor-scooter spawned an aid programme, or twenty thousand feet up in Robert Maxwell’s private jet buying up post-communist Bulgaria, or a NATO base in the North Atlantic to await the arrival of Satan, or to tea round the fire in Downing Street with a government minister and a mounted policeman, or to a wooden hut in West Africa where he, now persona non grata, and his Australian girlfriend, Catherine, managed to get married on the fringes of a dictator’s last-gasp political rally. But it was not all beer and skittles. There were run-ins with secret policemen in communist Eastern Europe, encounters with horrific conditions in post-communist so-called orphanages where Catherine kick-started a new, humane approach to physical and cognitive disability in children and adults, deliberate cultivation of the dissidents who would supplant a communist dictatorship and a close-up view of Europe’s biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, the result of Bulgaria’s ethnic cleansing of a tenth of its own population in 1989 barely noticed by western governments or media. All this, and much more, is recounted by someone who reckons that he struck lucky in the diplomatic dip.