Britain’s short-sighted embassy sale in Tokyo

SIR – Having served a total of 15 years with the Foreign Office in Japan, and worked for six years in London in Japanese trade and investment promotion roles, I share Charles Moore’s concern (Comment, October 26) that the decision to sell a large part of the British Embassy compound in Tokyo to Mitsubishi will do serious damage to British prestige – and therefore to British interests – in the country.

It will leave just one residence within the compound: that of the ambassador. This is a distinguished building – the Queen hosted a state banquet there for Emperor Hirohito in 1975 – but the land to be sold contains all five of the remaining significant staff houses in which official entertainment has always been carried out. (There were nine, but four more were surrendered to the Japanese government several years ago to make room for a public park.) Thousands of senior Japanese and UK businessmen and other key decision-makers have been brought together in these residences over the years.

There is a wider underlying factor at play here. In its drive to cut costs, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been downgrading staff housing all over the world and pushing official entertainment out into restaurants. Elsewhere, the savings from cheaper rented accommodation will have been far greater than the increased cost of entertaining in restaurants, but as these houses were owned not rented, that gain could not be achieved.

To achieve a gain over the long term, an alternative to their sale would have been to build, in their place, accommodation for all our Uk-based staff, of which there are about 30, most of whom already live in rented accommodation. This would have been less damaging to our prestige, but the saving would have taken more time to achieve.

David Cockerham

Bearsted, Kent