Sir Alan Urwick
Ambassador to Egypt and later Serjeant at Arms who had served with MI6 in Vienna and Moscow
SIR ALAN URWICK, who has died aged 86, followed a distinguished diplomatic career in the Middle East with six years at the Commons as a reforming Serjeant at Arms. Traditionally the House’s chief administrator came from the military, but MPs were discontented over how the running of the building had been handled over the years by unaccountable “men in tights”. The House of Commons Commission, under the Liberal MP Alan Beith, wanted an outsider and Sir Geoffrey Howe, Leader of the House, had as Foreign Secretary gained a high regard for Urwick.
Succeeding Sir Victor Le Fanu during the summer recess of 1989, Urwick arrived to find his offices unusable because of building work; unfazed, he commandeered a committee room.
Concluding that a chronic shortage of offices for MPs could be eased by converting grace-and-favour residences in the Palace into working space, Urwick vacated his own in Speaker’s Court to provide better facilities for the Shadow Cabinet; John Prescott eventually acquired the drawing room.
His deputy’s residence, atop the stairs leading to the Lobby, was reassigned to the Liberal Democrats. Margaret Thatcher’s efficiency advisor Sir Robin Ibbs recommended that the Commons take control of its own administration, finance and works programme, and Urwick implemented the proposals with panache. This was not surprising; his father had been a trailblazing management consultant.
The ongoing threat from the IRA and publicity-seeking protest groups led Urwick and Black Rod, Adml Sir Richard Thomas, to review the security of the Palace with the Metropolitan Police.
Late in 1994, Speaker Betty Boothroyd instructed Urwick to ascertain how the Guardian had obtained Commons paper on which it wrote to the Ritz in Paris requesting a copy of a bill run up by Jonathan Aitken. The resulting disclosure led eventually to the former Tory minister being imprisoned for perjury. Urwick summoned the paper’s editor, Peter Preston, who denied that the writing paper had come from the Commons.
Weeks later, he reprimanded three researchers for Conservative MPs who had got into Tony Blair’s office out of hours and riffled through papers on his desk.
In the Chamber, Urwick’s worst moment came in June 1992 when Labour MPs led by George Galloway and Dennis Canavan prevented the removal of the mace at the end of business in protest at water privatisation. A scuffle seemed inevitable until Dennis Skinner told the protesters Tony Newton, leader of the House, was ready to meet them.
Alan Bedford Urwick was born on May 2 1930, the son of Lt Col Lyndall Urwick, MC, and the former Joan Bedford. After they divorced his mother worked in naval intelligence, and as chief assistant to Lt Col Ewen Montague she devised a fictitious love life for the “man who never was”, whose body was floated on to a Spanish beach with documents pointing to an Allied landing in the south of France.
From the Dragon School Alan won a scholarship to Rugby, where he played Desdemona opposite his future FO colleague Julian Bullard’s Othello. He won an exhibition to New College, Oxford, taking a First in Modern History. During his National Service MI6 recruited him, posting him to Vienna then Brussels and Moscow, where he took over from Daphne Park.
Urwick, who spoke six languages, did not relish spending his career in the Soviet Union, so in 1960 went to Mecas, the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, at Shemlan in Lebanon. There he met and married Marta Montagne, daughter of Peru’s ambassador, and they moved to Baghdad at the precarious time when the monarchy had just been overthrown.
After Iraq he transferred from MI6 to the Foreign Office. He was posted to Amman (1965-67) and – after a spell in Washington – was deputy to the ambassador in Cairo (1970-73). He ran agents and reported to London during the turbulence in Iraq before Saddam Hussein seized power; the run-up to Israel’s seizure of the West Bank; and the period before Egypt’s disastrous Yom Kippur attack on Israel.
In mid-1973 he was seconded to Lord Rothschild’s Central Policy Review Staff, the Downing Street “think tank” created by Edward Heath. In 1975 he took charge of the FCO’s Near East and Africa department, earning the esteem of Arabs and Israelis alike. Then in 1977 he was appointed minister in Madrid, witnessing Spain’s first democratic elections after Franco’s death.
In 1979 he returned to Jordan as ambassador, renewing his friendship with King Hussein, “an astonishing man, who treated everyone equally”. It was the posting the Urwicks loved the most. His crowning achievement was a state visit by the Queen in 1984, which he insisted go ahead despite a terrorist bombing just beforehand. At its close, he was knighted at the Red Sea in Aqaba.
He left Amman that November to become ambassador in Cairo. The night before, the counsellor in the embassy received a call from someone claiming to be from the Abu Nidal terrorist organisation, stating that while they had not been able to kill the ambassador in Jordan they would try again in his next posting.
His rockiest moment in Cairo came in October 1985 with the hijacking of the liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian gunmen, who threw overboard a Jewish hostage in a wheelchair. Urwick was ordered by London to go to Alexandria to negotiate. He packed a bag and proceeded to the Italian embassy, where a helicopter was waiting, but the helicopter never took off; the Egyptians talked to the terrorists and put them on an aircraft bound for Tunis.
Urwick’s final posting, in 1987, was as High Commissioner in Ottawa, representing the UK but not the sovereign. However, he worked closely with the Canadians on security when the Queen hosted a G7 meeting in Toronto, amid fears of an IRA attack.
In the 1970s the Urwicks had bought the Moat House near Haywards Heath with, in its gardens, the Tudor ruin of Slaugham Place. In retirement Urwick restored the ruin with the help of English Heritage.
He also chaired the Anglo-Jordanian Society, organising a memorial service at St Paul’s after King Hussein’s death in 1999 of which a highlight was King Abdullah’s reading of a passage from the Koran.
He was appointed CMG in 1978, and made a Knight of St John in 1982.
His wife survives him, with their three sons. Sir Alan Urwick, born May 2 1930, died December 8 2016