The Daily Telegraph

Sir Leonard Allinson

Diplomat who found himself in the hot seat in Lusaka during the Commonweal­th meeting of 1979

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SIR LEONARD ALLINSON, who has died aged 96, was a diplomat who spent most of his career in Commonweal­th countries, including a torrid two years as High Commission­er in Lusaka (1978–80) followed by a more enjoyable final posting as High Commission­er in Kenya and Ambassador to the UN Environmen­t Programme (1982–86).

In a 1996 interview for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, he recalled the affection in which the late Queen was held in Britain’s former colonies and expressed his firm belief in the continuing value of Commonweal­th ties.

He recalled how, during the Queen’s visit to Kenya in 1983, the road from Nairobi to Nyeri, a distance of more than 100 miles, was thronged with people, while the children of the girls’ high school at Nyeri sang a song composed especially for her visit. It ran: “You brought us freedom, you brought us the English language, you brought us justice...”

Any other former colonial country, Allinson observed, would have “killed” for such sentiments.

Things were considerab­ly more difficult in his previous posting to Lusaka where he arrived in the run-up to the Commonweal­th Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) scheduled to be held in the Zambian capital in August 1979.

During the years of civil war in neighbouri­ng Rhodesia, Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda had supported the rebel movement of Joshua Nkomo, who was resident in Lusaka. Before CHOGM, tensions had been exacerbate­d by the shooting down by Nkomo’s men of a Rhodesian air liner with civilians on board, and the bombing by Rhodesian aircraft of a battalion of Nkomo’s men on parade outside Lusaka, which sparked incidents of violence against western diplomats.

To add to the real physical dangers the Queen and Britain’s new prime minister Margaret Thatcher would face, a problem arose when the Zambians tried to insist that Nkomo should be in the line-up when the Queen arrived at the airport. They seemed to back down under Allinson’s protests, but the night before the Queen was due he was tipped off that the Zambians had decided to include him anyway.

Allinson went to Kaunda’s political assistant, threatenin­g to telegram the Queen’s party on the plane to Lusaka which, he had no doubt, would turn elsewhere. After a heated exchange Allinson returned to his residence where, after about 20 minutes, the assistant phoned with the news that while Kaunda was “greatly displeased” with Allinson, “President Nkomo, as they called him, was going to be in Angola tomorrow!”

This left unresolved a passage in the speech which Kaunda was to give at the banquet for the Queen when he intended to refer to Nkomo and his followers as “freedom fighters”: “I had not been able to shift them on that so I had briefed the Queen’s party about it and they were able to finally talk Kaunda round when the Queen’s plane landed, when he was on the plane, quite a dramatic event in itself.”

In fact the Queen’s visit went off without a hitch and a huge crowd of Zambians greeted her at the airport.

That left the question of Mrs Thatcher’s arrival. In the run-up to the conference, the Zambian press and Kaunda himself “could not have been nastier about her”, and she was greeted on her arrival by a howling mob. Allinson and his staff, with Mrs

Thatcher’s entourage, had to form “a sort of rugger scrum” to get her safely into the airport buildings.

Like other heads of government Britain’s prime minister was accommodat­ed in her own villa in a special village. On the second day Allinson heard, indirectly, that there was no hot water in her taps. He arranged for a plumber to call and later asked her why she had not complained: “She said, ‘Well, I thought it was the same for everybody, I didn’t want a fuss. It’s all right now.’ I said, ‘Well is there anything else?’ She said, ‘Well, the eggs taste horrible, is it possible to get some decent eggs?’ I said, ‘Yes. There’s a US Peace Corps worker who is doing a hen project. I’ll send some eggs up. She said, ‘And an egg cup would be helpful.’ She’d been eating horrible eggs without an egg cup, you know. This is not the normal picture of Mrs Thatcher, is it?”

As it turned out she struck up an excellent relationsh­ip with Kaunda and at the end of CHOGM, which paved the way for the Lancaster House talks on Rhodesia, Kaunda hosted a farewell banquet at which she and Kaunda, and Denis Thatcher and Betty Kaunda, led the dance: “It was really quite touching, but it was a very intensive experience.”

Allinson was a firm believer in the Commonweal­th as a way of helping countries to develop and creating “good feeling between the races”. British foreign policy, he felt, with its focus on Europe and America, had not given it the attention it deserved.

Its attraction to former colonial states was illustrate­d in 1995 when Mozambique joined, despite having been a Portuguese colony. Allinson recalled attending a meeting in 1982 as Britain’s representa­tive in a five-nation Western “contact group’’ attempting to mediate an end to South African control of the former German colony of Namibia:

“The French member of our group was to speak for us [but] President Machel [of Mozambique] stopped him and said ‘You’re a Frenchman. You can’t talk about democracy, you were run by that General.’ His aides said, ‘General de Gaulle! General de Gaulle!’ ‘You Americans, you can’t speak about it. You had that General Eisenhower. The Germans, well ...’ Then he turned to me, ignoring the Canadian who was saying, ‘We haven’t got a General,’ and said, ‘It’s the British, the British! They know about democracy! I’ll listen to them about democracy!’”

Walter Leonard Allinson was born in Tottenham, north London, on May 1 1926, the only son of Walter Allinson, who worked for the London and North Eastern Railway, and Alice, née Cassidy. As he suffered badly from asthma he took up the bagpipes and joined the 10th Finchley Scouts, an associatio­n that led to a lifetime of friendship­s and travel.

After education at Friern Barnet Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford, where he took a First in History in 1944, he began his career in the home Civil Service, working at the Ministry of Fuel and Power and at the Ministry of Education before transferri­ng to the Commonweal­th Relations Office, which merged with the Foreign Office in 1968.

After stints as First Secretary in Lahore and Karachi (1960–62), then in Madras and New Delhi (1963–66), his first posting in Africa was as Deputy High Commission­er in Nairobi (1970–73). He then returned to Delhi as Deputy High Commission­er (1975-77).

Allinson’s time in Lusaka “ended in tears” after Nkomo, concerned at the inroads his rival Robert Mugabe was making into Rhodesia, started to move his men towards Rhodesia, provoking the Rhodesians to blow up bridges and roads in Zambia to stop him.

An infuriated and humiliated Kaunda blamed the British and demanded payment for the damage. Allinson got the High Commission press officer to issue a statement regretting the Rhodesian actions but refusing to take responsibi­lity, leading Allinson to be denounced in the Zambian press as a “fascist hyena”. Things became so dangerous that for the first time in his career Allinson and his staff began burning secret documents.

Kaunda, he recalled, “was raving and shouting, a sort of continual speech at the State House being broadcast”, while at the Allinsons’ residence, “the gardeners’ little children were walking round saying, ‘Kill! Kill!’ not knowing what they were saying. It really was quite unsettling.”

Allinson was prepared to stick it out, “But the government (or Lord Carrington) said, ‘You’d better come home’.”

In retirement in Wendron, near Helston, Cornwall, Allinson served on selection boards and became involved in local affairs, serving as treasurer for the regional branch of the Red Cross and for the local parish church, and as a school governor for Wendron School, helping to get it rebuilt. He loved seeing old friends and making new ones. He loved gardening and created an arboretum and an avenue of camellias. Later he and his wife moved to Pangbourne to be near two of their daughters.

Allinson was appointed MVO in 1961, CMG in 1976 and KCVO in 1979.

In 1951 he married Margaret “Peggy” Watts, whom he met when they were both working at the Ministry of Education. A staunch support to her husband during his diplomatic career, she died in 2017. He is survived by their three daughters.

Sir Leonard Allinson, born May 1 1926, died December 28 2022

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 ?? ?? Allinson: above, with the Queen in Kenya in 1983 and, right, with President Kaunda of Zambia and Betty Kaunda
Allinson: above, with the Queen in Kenya in 1983 and, right, with President Kaunda of Zambia and Betty Kaunda

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