Stephen Day
Diplomat who raised questions about Prince Andrew’s role as a UK trade and investment envoy
STEPHEN DAY, who has died aged 85, was a retired diplomat who in March 2011 wrote a trenchant letter questioning the performance of the Duke of York as trade envoy and citing a number of troubling relationships he maintained with dubious Middle East businessmen.
The Duke had been the UK’S Special Representative for International Trade and Investment since 2001, travelling the world promoting Britain’s business interests, and concerns over his performance in this role had been circulating for some time. By March 2011 the Duke was also facing mounting criticism over his association with the American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who had been jailed for 18 months in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
In early March, Day, an Arabist who had served as Ambassador to Tunisia, was invited to give an interview on the Today programme about Arab funding of British academic institutions. En route to the studio he had been shocked to learn that in October 2010 the Duke had entertained to lunch at Buckingham Palace Sakher el-materi, the son-in-law of Tunisia’s hated former dictator President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (who had been deposed in January 2011).
In response to questioning by John Humphrys, he described el-materi as “notorious” and “the worst of all” the crooks in the presidential family, adding: “I can’t imagine how it [the lunch] happened. The embassy in Tunis was clear this man carried a lot of baggage.”
A few days later, in a letter to three government departments, leaked to The Daily Telegraph, Day called for the Duke to be sacked from his role as trade envoy, claiming that his activities were doing “serious damage to the Royal family itself and to Britain’s political, diplomatic and commercial interests”.
More worrying than the Buckingham Palace lunch, Day wrote, were claims that, some years before, the Duke had paid a private visit to the Hammamet holiday home of Mohamed Mabrouk, one of three brothers with close links to Ben Ali. Day had been told by a trusted Tunisian contact that the visit had been arranged by a notorious Libyan fixer, and that during his stay the Duke had visited the nearby villa of el-materi for a meeting with the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, who was staying as his guest.
“The message being spread around the world,” wrote Day, “is that Britain is so desperate for business, so incapable of competing openly, that it needs a back-door approach and is content to work closely with dodgy fixers and politicians.”
Middle Eastern potentates, he observed, generally conduct negotiations on trade and finance through agents and associates: “To use a member of our Royal family for such purposes is seen by Arabs as crude and unworthy of our historic connections.”
In July 2011, the Duke resigned from his post as Britain’s trade envoy after a photograph was published showing him walking with Jeffrey Epstein in Central Park in 2010, two years after the US financier had pleaded guilty to child sex charges.
Stephen Peter Day was born on January 19 1938 in Ilford, Essex, to Frank Day and Mary, née Franklin; he was educated at Bancroft’s School and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
One of the last recruits to the British Overseas Civil Service, in 1961 he was appointed as a political officer to the Western Aden Protectorate, advising the sultans and sheikhs who made up the shortlived Federation of South Arabia. He was there during the Aden Emergency, which lasted from 1963 to 1967, when the Aden Protectorate became the Republic of South Yemen, playing a central part in the handover.
During the insurgency, Day recalled how his life was saved at his post near the Yemen border when a tribal leader, using a Kalashnikov, held off a mob surrounding his vehicle. Yet in 1965, things were peaceful enough in Aden itself for him to be able to marry Angela Waudby in a garrison church.
Before the ceremony, they were honoured with a traditional Arab wedding in the mountains where he was based, attended by several thousand armed Yemeni tribesmen. After the birth of their first child, they decided that it was safer for her to leave Aden.
Transferring to the Foreign Office, from 1970 to 1972 Day was first secretary in the political adviser’s office of the C-in-c Far East in Singapore. After postings to the UN in New York, and in Beirut and Canada, from 1981 to 1984 he served as Ambassador to Qatar.
Back in London from 1984 to 1987 as head of the Middle East Department of the Foreign Office, he took time out in 1986 on special attachment to the Household of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
He accompanied the royal couple on a tour of Saudi Arabia, recalling, in a letter to The Times in 2016, that he and the Prince had devised a project to help to integrate Britain’s Muslim community into wider society: “The Amir of Qatar agreed to fund a London base for the project, while Shell, BP and HSBC undertook to provide supporting staff and recurrent funding. The FCO was to release me to direct the operation.”
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia had offered to fund the rebuilding of a small London mosque, together with an educational centre, as a pilot. But, Day recalled, when the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher heard about the scheme she was not amused: “In the words of one Foreign Office official, ‘The sound of breaking furniture could be heard all round Whitehall.’ The project was scrapped, but the mosque [in Finsbury Park] was built and was taken over by extremists. Our government has been slow to learn.”
Towards the end of Day’s time in charge of the Middle East department Matrix Churchill first applied for export licences for machine tools to Iraq. In 1993 Day was one of the first witnesses to give evidence to the inquiry, under Lord Justice Scott, set up to investigate the extent of Government collusion in the export of arms and defence equipment to Iraq .
Day told the inquiry that in November 1984 crucial changes were made to guidelines on supplying defence equipment to Iran and Iraq, then at war with each other, because the original guidelines, which said British companies could only supply “non-lethal” equipment, had caused problems. Britain’s neutral stance during the war had been heavily criticised by many Gulf states, who perceived Iran as a threat and wanted Britain to support Iraq.
As a consequence, Day explained, policy had been altered to ban defence equipment which “prolonged or exacerbated the conflict”. He acknowledged that he had written a minute in November 1984 in which he said the new guidelines should be “allowed to trickle out in order to minimise controversy” (Parliament was not told of the change until the following October). But he steadfastly denied allegations that the changes (which critics claimed enabled British exporters to supply so-called “dual use” equipment to Iraq for military purposes), were deliberately kept secret.
From 1987 to 1992 Day served as Britain’s Ambassador to Tunisia and also, as Middle East peace negotiations began, as the Government’s official intermediary with the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, with whom he was said to have become close.
Given his expertise in the Middle East, there was some surprise when he was then posted to Hong Kong as Senior British Trade Commissioner. There were suggestions that he would remain in the territory as London’s most senior representative after the handover to China in 1997. Instead, after a few months in office, he left Hong Kong due to ill health. He took early retirement from the Foreign Office in 1993.
Day was appointed CMG in 1989. In retirement he worked as a consultant on Middle East affairs and was director or chairman of several organisations promoting Arab-british understanding, including as chairman for 15 years of the British Tunisian Society.
Stephen Day is survived by his wife and by two daughters and a son.
Stephen Day, born January 19 1938, died March 14 2023