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Sir John Margetson
Former spy who became ambassador to Vietnam, the UN and the Netherlands and was George Brown’s favourite speechwriter
Margetson was “the perfect diplomat”
With his unusually even-tempered
ways and impeccable manners, John
Margetson was most people’s idea of
the perfect diplomat, but he at least did
not think he made a perfect spy. In 1960,
having been a colonial officer for a
decade, he joined MI6 knowing about
espionage only what he had read in the
Ashenden stories of Somerset Maugh-
am. Among the other recruits who
reported for training at a nondescript
house in Westminster was David Corn-
well (John Le Carré), who became a
firm friend for life.
Over the next few months they were
taught their trade: agent-running in the
field, safe houses, dead letterboxes,
surveillance, explosives, shooting (for
the first and last time) and ciphers.
They learnt to kill with a single blow
and to fight mano a mano (“Always keep
the knife moving, dear boy, in a figure of
eight”). They landed, and evacuated,
agents in a small bay on the Osborne
estate on the Isle of Wight.
Yet despite the excitement of covert-
ly entering ships in the Rotterdam
docks to collect images of Soviet har-
bour facilities, not to mention finding
Rudolf Hess’s long-forgotten trousers
in a secret safe, ultimately a life in the
shadows was not for Margetson.
Nor was unarmed combat. All his life
he eschewed physical exercise, apart
from some gentle badminton when he
was ambassador in Hanoi. Although
the object of that, as it happened, was to
glean intelligence from fellow diplo-
mats in the open air, away from listen-
ing devices.
Accordingly, in the mid-Sixties,
already nearing 40, Margetson joined
the Foreign Office. There he made his
mark as the favourite speechwriter of
George Brown, the mercurial foreign
secretary. In spite of Brown’s tendency
to call him in the early hours demand-
ing a speech about Vietnam “by yester-
day”, Margetson enjoyed the work.
He was regarded as rare in his ability
to draft texts using the short sentences
and upbeat style that Brown wanted —
and free of the Latin tags that manda-
rins employed ad infinitum. Margetson
acknowledged, however, that Brown’s
proclivities made him an impossible
boss. Things went best when the senior
departmental lady (as typists were
known) was able to secure the key to
the sherry cupboard before Brown pre-
pared to address the Commons.
Margetson was posted to Saigon in
1968 as head of chancery, dealing with
the embassy’s political activities in
South Vietnam. Arriving just after the
Tet Offensive, with two very small
children in tow, he found his main task
was to decide which of the many view-
points about the war’s progress was
true. His trips into the field led him to
develop a “guarded pessimism” about
its outcome, in contrast to the more
optimistic line fed to Whitehall by the
ambassador, Murray MacLehose, who
was later governor of Hong Kong.
Back in London by the early Seven-
ties, Margetson worked in the cabinet
secretariat briefing Edward Heath, the
prime minister, on foreign affairs. One
of his jobs involved taking minutes of
meetings. This was made tricky by the
habit of Alec Douglas-Home, the for-
eign secretary, of speaking with one or
two ballpoint pens in his mouth while
sliding farther and farther in his leather
chair under the meeting table.
Margetson’s achievements included
organising the reception of the Asians
expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin and
setting in motion Britain’s anti-terroristplanning. The latter, in which he vainly
tried to interest Reginald Maudling, the
home secretary, before Lord Hailsham
of St Marylebone, the lord chancellor,
made a fortunate remark about the
importance of a “chain of command”,
was vindicated several years later by
the ending of the Iranian embassy siege
by the SAS.
After a spell at Nato in Brussels, Mar-
getson returned to Vietnam in 1978 as
ambassador. It was then regarded as the
hardest posting in the service, the only
link to the outside world being a weekly
flight to Bangkok on which standing
was acceptable. Living conditions were
demanding, one word Margetson
learnt was a new coinage meaning “to
wash without soap”, and inside infor-
mation was hard to gather.
Using all his considerable charm,
Margetson cultivated neutral diplo-
mats whose countries were closer to the
regime. Affecting an interest in yoga, he
picked up gossip over tea with the Indi-who had organised the attack. Charac-
teristically, the two became friends.
Margetson’s degree sparked an inter-
est in Africa and he spent the 1950s with
the Colonial Service helping to prepare
Tanzania for independence. Under-
cover with the Secret Intelligence Ser-
vice, he served at the Hague, where in
1963 he married Miranda, daughter of
the painters William Coldstream and
Nancy Sharp (later Spender).
Miranda worked on the Times Liter-
ary Supplement but took gamely to
diplomatic life, even serving as the de
facto embassy cook in Hanoi. She sur-
vives him with their son Andrew, a film
and advertising director, and daughter
Clare, a senior editor on The Guardian.
After 18 months as deputy perman-
ent representative at the UN in New
York, Margetson returned to the Neth-
erlands in 1984 for his final posting as
ambassador. He loved hosting parties
and used these to promote the notion of
Britons being good Europeans — even
if his abiding memory of his time there
was of the extraordinary energy, and
obstinacy in debate, of the visiting Mar-
garet Thatcher.
In retirement, until suffering a brain
haemorrhage in 1994, Margetson de-
voted himself to music. A piano player,
and former jazz double bassist, he was
chairman of the Royal School of
Church Music and of the Yehudi Menu-
hin School. He was proud, as chairman
of the joint committee of the Royal Col-
lege of Music and the Royal Academy of
Music, of having scotched a plan to
combine the institutions. “So,” he re-
flected, “that was one good thing I did.”Sir John Margetson, KCMG, diplomat,
was born on October 9, 1927. He died on
October 17, 2020, aged 93She calmly refused to leave. “I’m a
doctor — what have you done for
society?” she asked them. Elders
warned her that the militants could
“shoot me at a moment’s notice”, but
she refused to back down. “I told them,
‘If I die, I will die with my people and my
dignity,’ ” she said in a 2011 New York
Times interview. Somalis across the
country condemned the militants’attack. After days of house arrest, under
mounting local and international
pressure, the insurgents retreated —
but not before writing an apology note,
at her insistence.
Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe was born in
Mogadishu in 1947. She never knew her
precise date of birth and later adopted
the May 28 birthday of her daughter
Deqo Mohamed. Her mother died ofan envoy. He learnt that the Vietnam-
ese were not sending reinforcements to
the Chinese border by getting the Ro-
manian military attaché to watch the
trains that went by his house. Marget-
son was also instrumental in alerting
the West to the scale of the humanitar-
ian crisis caused by hundreds of thou-
sands of “boat people” fleeing Vietnam.
John William Denys Margetson was
born in 1927 in Edinburgh, where his
father, William, an Anglican clergy-
man, was provost of St Mary’s Cathe-dral. When John was eight, his mother,
Marion, died, as did his father a decade
later. These early losses fostered his
self-reliance and readiness to pursue
opportunities.
After Blundell’s School, in Devon, he
went to St John’s College, Cambridge, as
a choral scholar and to read anthropol-
ogy and archaeology.
His studies were interrupted by two
years of National Service as an officer
in the Life Guards. This was largely
spent in what was Palestine, as Britain
prepared to leave at the end of the
Mandate.
The threat of assassination made his
time there “very unpleasant”. It culmi-
nated in narrowly escaping being
blown up when his armoured car was
ambushed in the Judean highlands.
The shock led to the onset of complete
alopecia.
He never returned to the Middle
East, but by a remarkable coincidence
later met in Italy an Israeli diplomatHe joined MI6 at the
same time as David
Cornwell (John Le Carré)
Hawa Abdi
Soviet-trained Somali doctor who built a haven for families fleeing civil war and poverty and faced off with Islamist militants
On New Year’s Day 1993, President
George HW Bush travelled to the out-
skirts of Mogadishu, the Somali capital,
where he was taken on a tour of Hawa
Abdi Hope Village. His guide was “Ma-
ma Hawa” herself, a doctor who had
turned her family’s farm and the sur-
rounding land into a haven for those
fleeing famine, civil war and poverty.
What had begun ten years earlier as
a one-room clinic to help women in
childbirth had grown into a 400-bed
facility with a hospital, school and camp
for displaced people; the compound
was a makeshift city, one that for a time
was home to 90,000 Somalis living in
huts made from sticks and plastic
sheets. Under Mama Hawa they re-
ceived medical care, food and educa-
tion. She established literacy classes for
women and an agricultural project to
support former herders. As the camp
grew she realised the need to imple-
ment order and set down rules:
husbands who beat their wives would
be sent to “jail” (a storeroom with
barred windows), while newcomers
had to renounce the clan politics that
had divided communities and fuelled
Somalia’s civil war.
On more than one occasion she
received unwanted guests: Islamist
militants who pillaged documents and
medical equipment. One day in 2010, a
group of 750 gunmen belonging to
Hizbul Islam, a radical group known for
stoning offenders and chopping off
their hands, surrounded the hospital.
Storming the hallways, they shot
anaesthesia machines and smashed
windows before demanding that Abdi
hand over management of the hospital
to them.
childbirth complications when Abdi
was still young; her father worked in the
port. Aged 12, she was forced to marry
an older man but the relationship
would end in divorce.
After winning a scholarship to the
Soviet Union and studying medicine in
Kiev (in what is now Ukraine), she
became one of the first trained Somali
gynaecologists and returned to Moga-
dishu in 1971 — when, according to her
memoir, there were only 60 doctors in
Somalia. One Russian saying never left
her: “The beauty of a city is the statues
or the streets, but the beauty of a
human being is his work. If you want to
be beautiful, do the work.”
Once back in Mogadishu she earned
a law degree on the side to help to deep-
en her understanding of setting up a
medical practice and charity. For a time
she worked at Digfer Hospital, where
only one other doctor was female.
In 1983 she opened a small clinic on
her family farm to care for pregnant
women and young children. As her rep-
utation grew she sold a stockpile of gold
to feed those who flocked to her door-
step, and with the onset of civil war in
the early 1990s she would treat anyone
who visited her with a health problem,
be it malnutrition or malaria. As the
fighting escalated, she trained and
hired dozens of doctors and nurses. In
a country with barely any healthcare
infrastructure she saw it all, learning to
deal with outbreaks of tuberculosis as
well as the devastating toll of famines,
such as the one that struck in 2011. She
had not intended to support thousands
of displaced families “but necessity is
the mother of invention”, she told
visiting reporters. An estimated 10,000displaced Somalis remain in the camp.
Abdi married Aden Mohamed, a
military technician, in 1973. They later
separated and he died in 2012. She is
survived by their daughters Deqo, who
became a gynaecologist and is the chief
executive of the Dr Hawa Abdi Foun-
dation, and Amina, also a doctor, who
oversees the administration of Hope
Village. Another daughter, from her
first marriage, died as an infant. Abdi
attributed this to the female genital cut-
ting ritual she had undergone as a child,
which she believed had compromised
the birth. She also had a son, who died
aged 23.
Her humanitarian work increasingly
attracted global attention. In 2012 she
was nominated for the Nobel peace
prize and in 2017 she was awarded an
honorary doctorate by Harvard Uni-
versity. Described as “equal parts
Mother Teresa and Rambo” by Glam-
our magazine, she published a memoir,
Keeping Hope Alive: How One Somali
Woman Changed 90,000 Lives.
Unable to attend the 2012 Women in
the World conference in New York City,
Abdi sent a message to the audience
that was read by the actress Angelina
Jolie, delivering a testimonial on her
behalf. “I have given my people my
heart and my soul,” she said. “Still I did
not lose my hope. One day my people’s
lives will change in a better way.”Hawa Abdi, doctor and activist, was
born on May 28, 1947. She died of
complications from several strokes on
August 5, 2020, aged 73Abdi and her daughters Deqo and Amina were Glamour’s 2010 Women of the Year
DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES