Obituary: Sir Ewen Fergusson, rugby international and diplomat

Ewen Fergusson was capped five times as a rugby union international for Scotland and was a crucial player in the drama of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall.

Six and a half feet tall and from a prosperous British colonial background, he joined the Foreign Office in preference to a career in the Army, and added to his sporting glory a stellar ascent up the diplomatic ranks to the plum position of British ambassador in Paris.

As ambassador, he would be one of the half-dozen people surrounding Mrs Thatcher, then Prime Minister, in the room on the third floor of his magnificent residence in the Rue du Faubourg St Honore, when she heard, a glass of whisky in her hand, that she had failed to win enough Tory Party votes to avoid a second ballot for the leadership. Two days later, back in Britain, she would resign.

The news came in a telephone call from London on the evening of 20 November, 1990, as she and Sir Ewen were preparing to attend a state banquet at the Palace of Versailles.

She shored up her doomed determination to “fight on” – announced, defiantly, to the world’s press in Sir Ewen’s embassy courtyard – not only by telephoning her husband Denis, children Mark and Carol and her colleagues Norman Tebbit and George Younger, but by confiding her innermost feelings to Sir Ewen, as, in black chiffon and lace and crimson jacket, she spent a few minutes in his sitting room before setting off for the engagement in an official car. “I regarded the gossips that I had with her in the car… as an absolutely fascinating bonus to my professional experience,” Sir Ewen recalled. This was the “single anecdote affecting personalities which I would put to the top in my time in Paris”. He had met her at the airport and would escort her back on her departure.

“It was obvious when she arrived in Paris that she was nervous”, he reflected. “She was a very lonely figure during the conference (on security and co-operation in Europe)… Then the news came through and it was obviously an appalling shock to her... (she) knew she was going back to face the music.”

As well as Mrs Thatcher, Sir Ewen entertained Princess Diana at the embassy in 1988; and was host to the Queen in 1992. In his five and a half years as ambassador in Paris from 1987 until 1992 he reckoned he had about 50 ministerial visits a year from Britain. He was appointed KCMG in 1987, GCVO in 1992 and GCMG in 1993. France made him Grand Officier, Legion d’Honneur in 1992.

He had earlier served as ambassador to South Africa, which was at that time outside the Commonwealth. British government ministers, he recalled, “scarcely ever came”. Yet in the land of the Springboks, as in France, his prowess at rugby for Scotland was, it is remembered, “a great help” for diplomatic relations.

An old Africa hand, Sir Ewen had learned Amharic for the four-year stint he would spend as second secretary at the embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 1960, during which he found himself in the middle of a rebellion – which eventually failed – against the emperor, Haile Selassie.

Between foreign postings, Fergusson early earned respect for his abilities at tasks allotted him in London, such as the challenging one of being assistant private secretary to Duncan Sandys, minister of defence, in 1957, the year Sandys made swingeing cuts in the armed forces and announced the end of national service. Fergusson found Sandys “a very demanding person”.

Having joined the Foreign Office in 1956, Fergusson had himself not long finished his own national service as a second lieutenant with the 60th Rifles (KRRC). He had therefore been able to observe the Suez Crisis of 1956 both from the army’s point of view as it waited for action, and then as a member of the Foreign Office’s Africa department – which included Egypt – just as the abortive invasion went in that November. He was to return to the exalted job of private secretary to senior ministers in the 1970s after postings in the British Trade Development Office in New York, and as counsellor and head of chancery at the office of Britain’s permanent representative to the European communities in Brussels, where he helped smooth Britain’s entry from 1973 into the then EEC, now the EU. From 1975 until 1978 he would be the right-hand man to successive foreign secretaries James Callaghan, Anthony Crosland, and David Owen.

Ewen Alastair John Fergusson sprang from a Scottish family that made its wealth in Singapore: his father worked for the Straits Trading Company tin mining concern, becoming chairman in 1947.

In 1959, Fergusson married Sara Carolyn Montgomery Cuninghame (nee Gordon Lennox). They would have a son, Ewen, and two daughters, Iona and Anna.

Fergusson was educated at Rugby School and Oriel College, Oxford. His rugby, played for Oxford University in 1952 and 1953, was preparation for the event he always considered his great achievement – representing Scotland in 1954. The Scotland team’s adversaries in five matches, three at Murrayfield, one at Belfast, and one at Swansea, were France, the New Zealand All Blacks, Ireland, England and Wales. Sadly the Scots lost all five: the nation’s winning streak did not return until the following year, 1955. Fergusson nevertheless proudly kept his Scottish caps.