Sir Christopher Meyer, the former UK ambassador to Washington and John Major’s press secretary, has died aged 78 after suffering a stroke in the French Alps. He was with his wife, Catherine, at the time.
Meyer was ambassador during one of the most turbulent periods in UK relations with the US. After leaving the diplomatic service he held the position of president of the Press Complaints Commission.
He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1966 and held posts in Moscow, Madrid and Brussels. After a spell as press secretary to Major, the then prime minister, between 1993 and 1996, Meyer was briefly appointed ambassador to Germany before being sent to Washington by Tony Blair in 1997.
His unusually long stint at the heart of the special relationship spanned the end of the Clinton administration and the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001. He was Blair’s liaison to the George W Bush administration during the invasion of Afghanistan and the previous period. in the Iraq war.
He claimed that Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, ordered him “to get up in the White House and stay there”. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, became his tennis partner, reflecting his charm and ability to move across the political spectrum.
Despite being given the ambassadorship by Blair, he told the inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq led by Sir John Chilcott that he believed the prime minister’s relationship with Bush had become so close that in fact , gave a blank check for the president. go ahead with the invasion.
He told the inquest there was “a great deal of time” when Bush and Blair were effectively alone at the Crawford summit in Texas in April 2002.
He said there were clues to Blair’s thinking in a speech he gave in the US at the time about regime change.
In his autobiography, DC Confidential, he became more critical of Blair’s modus operandi and of some of Blair’s cabinet ministers, including the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. He described Straw as a B-list politician more to be liked than admired. His critics in the Blair administration later said he had faltered because he had been excluded from critical meetings.
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Famous for his red socks, Meyer, as press secretary, tried to project the Major administration at a time when the Conservative government was falling in part because of bad reason.
He married Catherine Meyer, the founder of the charity Parents and Abducted Children Together. Her German ex-husband had refused to let their children back on holiday, leading to a lengthy legal battle. In 2020, she was appointed the prime minister’s commercial envoy to Ukraine.