Sir Leonard Appleyard
Diplomat in China during the Cultural Revolution who later assisted in the Hong Kong handover
SIR LEONARD APPLEYARD, who has died aged 81, was one of the Foreign Office’s leading China hands: in Peking for Mao’s Cultural Revolution, private secretary to the Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe as the handover of Hong Kong was negotiated, and retiring as Ambassador in Beijing once it was accomplished; the Chinese thanked him for its smoothness.
A small, tough, dark, balding Yorkshireman keen on classical music and football, Appleyard was adept at letting the politicians take the credit for his diplomatic spadework. He was much liked by his staff despite a justified reputation for wanting everything done at the double.
Arriving in Peking as a second secretary in 1966, Appleyard showed calm and courage as the Cultural Revolution erupted into anti-british violence.
In June 1967 Red Guards smashed their way into the Mission and kicked and jostled two diplomats, Anthony Blishen and the future Foreign Office minister Ray Whitney.
Appleyard and Blishen’s wife, who had left the compound before the crowd broke in, were punched and harried for several minutes. The police stood by as Embassy windows and flower pots were smashed, a portrait of the Queen defaced and a Union Jack ripped to shreds.
Weeks later, Appleyard was one of two diplomats pelted with tomatoes by a 1,000-strong mob. In the Commons the Labour Foreign Office minister Bill Rodgers, asked if he was satisfied that Britain had protested strongly enough, said he was, but remarked: “I greatly regret that we have not had satisfactory replies.”
That August a mob protesting at the arrest of three Communist journalists in Hong Kong, led by Red Guards, sacked the Legation, seizing the chargé d’affaires, who refused to kowtow. The squeeze was maintained, with the authorities stalling over exit visas for embassy staff; Appleyard and his young family were kept waiting five months before being allowed to leave in September 1968.
In August 1994 Appleyard returned to the Chinese capital, by then known as Beijing, as Ambassador, having been knighted to demonstrate that the posting was now on a par with Washington and Paris. His task was to keep relations with China on an even keel as the handover approached.
Outstanding issues at times put him at odds with Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s final colonial governor, who was trying to embed a degree of democracy which China, and the Foreign Office, found unhelpful.
One contentious issue was the composition and powers of Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal; Appleyard and Michael Heseltine raised objections to Patten’s proposals, but the Prime Minister John Major gave the governor the final say on Britain’s negotiating strategy.
Leonard Vincent Appleyard was born at Cawood, near Selby, on September 2 1938. From the Read School, Drax, he read Classical Chinese at Queens’ College, Cambridge, then joined the Foreign Office in 1962.
He was posted as a third secretary to Hong Kong in 1964, then after two years’ Chinawatching was sent to Peking. After his return to the FCO in 1968, postings followed to New Delhi in 1971, then in 1975 to Moscow. Each capital was a window on China.
After a brief spell with the Treasury, Appleyard went to Paris in 1979 as financial counsellor. In August 1980, with colleagues on holiday, he found himself taking up the plight of hundreds of British yachtsmen stranded in French ports by a fishermen’s blockade.
He returned to the FCO in 1982 as head of economic relations, then early in 1984 was appointed principal private secretary to Howe; almost his first duty was to accompany him to Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.
Appleyard was well-placed as Howe concluded the agreement to hand Hong Kong over to China when Britain’s lease on the New Territories expired. But he was also involved in every other aspect of his work.
One of particular sensitivity concerned Howe’s efforts to have Scotland Yard ban demonstrations by British Sikhs following the Indian military’s raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 to flush out militants demanding an independent Sikh state, which killed about 1,000 people.
Howe believed that such demonstrations would carry very serious risks, both for Indo-british relations and for law and order. Appleyard minuted the Home Office that the protests would “also further intensify the Indian government’s resentment against the UK” and force India to impose a costly trade boycott. Britain was then trying to sell Westland helicopters to Delhi.
In 1986 Appleyard was appointed Ambassador to Hungary. Among his junior staff was Lord St Andrews, elder son of the Duke of Kent, the only member of the royal family to serve as a diplomat behind the Iron Curtain.
Leaving Budapest in 1989, months before Hungary breached that curtain by opening its border with Austria, he was seconded to be deputy Cabinet Secretary for foreign policy and defence.
Margaret Thatcher was in full voice over Europe, and Appleyard’s vivid account of one stormy Cabinet in 1990 prompted Douglas Hurd to remark that there were now three items on every Cabinet agenda: “parliamentary affairs, home affairs and xenophobia”.
Appleyard sat in on John Major’s Gulf “War Cabinet”, and in February 1991 was at the Cabinet table when the IRA fired a mortar bomb at No 10 which landed 50ft away and blew in the windows.
Later that year he returned to the FCO as political director. In December 1991 Major dispatched him from the Maastricht summit to assess conditions in the disintegrating Soviet Union on a whistle-stop tour to Moscow, Kiev and Minsk. Appleyard told the leaders of the new Commonwealth of Independent States that the West would judge them on their control of nuclear weapons, the rights of minorities, and the Soviet Union’s £40 billion of foreign debt.
He was able to reassure Major that Soviet nuclear weapons would remain under central control and command. He also reported that Boris Yeltsin had signalled for the first time that Russia might accept Western help in dismantling parts of that arsenal. Appleyard also met President Gorbachev, whose star was on the wane, and in Kiev signed a joint communiqué establishing consular relations with Ukraine.
His final appointment, to Beijing in 1994, began in personally turbulent circumstances. Just before he left he divorced his wife Elizabeth and married Joan Jefferson, who resigned as head of St Swithun’s School in Winchester to join him. A flurry of tabloid coverage involved an FCO secretary who had also been expecting to marry him when the divorce came through.
Once the couple got to Beijing, the posting proved a success; one highlight was a visit in 1995 by Margaret Thatcher.
Retiring in November 1997, Appleyard was vice-chairman of Barclays Capital until 2003. He went on to serve as pro-chancellor of Bournemouth University, and a senior fellow and visiting professor at the University of Southampton. He chaired the council of Winchester Cathedral from 2007.
He was appointed CMG in 1984, and KCMG in 1994.
Leonard Appleyard married, first, in 1964, Elizabeth West; they had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1994, in which year he married, secondly, Joan Jefferson.
Leonard Appleyard, born September 2 1938, died February 7 2020