Dame Margaret Anstee, diplomat – obituary

Margaret Anstee reckoned this “a turning point in my life. I’d been through three revolutions and thought: 'This could never happen in England’, but having seen what happened in Chile, the most civilised country in the continent, I realise you can never know what human beings are capable of doing to one another.”

She had little time for UN bureaucracy, or for general secretaries who pigeonholed her reports on improving its effectiveness. Passed over four times for her “dream job” of High Commissioner for Refugees, she was eventually appointed to head the UN’s “third headquarters” in Geneva, coordinating action against drug trafficking.

She rose to the UN’s highest echelon despite persistent sexual rumour-mongering. As the peace fell apart in Angola, she was branded a “bandit” by the MPLA government, and – in her mid-60s – a “prostitute” by Unita rebels. When peace did break out, she was welcomed back with fulsome apologies.

Margaret Joan Anstee was born at Writtle, Essex on June 25 1926, the daughter of a typesetter. The lady of the manor would not sign her first passport application as she did not “know” the Anstees.

Despite protracted illness, Margaret was accepted at Chelmsford High School, learning Spanish in three months to win places at Oxford and Cambridge. Choosing Newnham College, Cambridge, she took a double First in Modern and Medieval Languages.

She lectured in Spanish at Queen’s University, Belfast, then joined the Foreign Office in 1948. Appointed to the Latin American section, she was told no woman could be sent there lest they succumb to a local male.

By 1951 she was working for Donald Maclean, head of the American department. One Friday, Maclean asked if she could cope the next day as something had “cropped up”. No one at the FO saw him again; over the weekend he defected to the Soviet Union.

To her astonishment, Margaret Anstee was never questioned about Maclean’s defection. (The Americans noticed, causing problems when the UN recruited her.) She was stunned, reckoning Maclean loyal, but was less surprised about Guy Burgess, whom she detested.

She had to leave the service in 1952 when she married a colleague posted to the Philippines. “He took to Manila life like a duck to water,” she wrote, “but unfortunately failed to stick to water.”

Returning divorced, she was shortlisted to succeed Denis Healey as international secretary of the Labour Party. Then the UN Technical Assistance Board (Untab) offered her a job in Mexico, only for the head of mission to veto the appointment of a woman.

Early in 1956 she went to Colombia. A colleague ordered her to take shorthand; by that August she was running the UN’s office in Bogota. She reflected on “a very macho world, a hard row to hoe for a woman alone, but a tremendously maturing experience.”

After two years she became mission chief in Uruguay for Untab and the Food & Agriculture Organisation, organising a successful visit by the prickly Dag Hammarskjold. Soon she was doubling as Untab/FAO representative in Argentina, being given Eva Peron’s old office.

She was first sent to Bolivia in 1960. After President Kennedy announced his Alliance for Progress, she advised the Bolivians at its founding congress; when she spoke, the American delegate said: “Shut up, you’re just the interpreter.”

Margaret Anstee set up a technical cooperation programme with Britain’s new Ministry of Overseas Development; when she left, the Bolivians named a hospital after her and offered her a medal – which the UN insisted she refuse.

In 1965 she moved to Ethiopia, encouraging Haile Selassie to improve public health. Then, to be close to her ailing mother, she returned to Britain as deputy head of Harold Wilson’s Downing Street “think tank” under Tommy Balogh. When Balogh returned to academia Margaret Anstee became acting head of the think tank, but left when Wilson would not order the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend to let her see papers on the economy.

She rejoined the UN in 1969, as chief of staff to the Australian Cmdr Sir Robert Jackson, to whom she became close until his death in 1991.

After a short spell in Morocco, she moved to Chile in 1972. Salvador Allende’s Marxist government was in trouble; she liked him, but reckoned some of his ministers dangerous and tried to keep her mission neutral.

Pulled out to help tackle the cyclone in Bangladesh, she was in Britain when Pinochet seized power. She managed to rescue several UN staff who had been tortured, and protect refugees in Chile from other authoritarian regimes; Britain refused them asylum. Every day, she saw bodies in the river.

She persuaded Pinochet’s ministers to continue key UN programmes, then in 1974 was promoted to assistant secretary-general. Kurt Waldheim put over her a Chinese official who took orders from Beijing, hoping China would deliver him an extra term.

Britain proposed her in 1982 to head the World Food Programme, but the job went to an Australian. Instead Javier Perez de Cuéllar sent her back to Bolivia; she worked up a second development programme that won international and IMF support, and in 1984 found the site for her future home.

After coordinating relief following the 1985 Mexican earthquake, Margaret Anstee was promoted to under-secretary-general in Vienna. In 1990 she organised a conference on crime in Havana chaired by Fidel Castro; America boycotted it, and detained returning UN staff. She also persuaded Margaret Thatcher to stage a global conference on drug use, finding her “someone you could argue with,” even if they did not see eye to eye on politics.

 Perez de Cuéllar put her in charge of drought relief for his native Peru, then in 1991 appointed her UN Coordinator for Chernobyl. Five years after the reactor fire, 100,000 people were still homeless and a million living in “contaminated areas” and she saw children in Kiev dying of leukaemia no one could prove was caused by the disaster.

With minimal staff and finances, she persuaded four republics of the disintegrating Soviet Union to agree a plan, but the West would not put money into the region. Her appeals for funds to redress the environmental damage done by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait also fell on deaf ears.

Her final mission, from 1992, was the toughest: heading the UN Angola Verification Mission (Univerm). With 400 unarmed blue-beret troops, she was charged with disarming 150,000 fighters from Unita and the MPLA before elections that September.

The MPLA won elections of – in her view – “textbook” fairness, Unita’s Dr Jonas Savimbi rejected the result and civil war broke out. She repeatedly negotiated ceasefires – broken by Unita – and peace conferences Savimbi would fail to attend or try to stall. Savimbi – briefed by friends at the UN – demanded her removal as the price for talking; she retired, but the war continued until Savimbi’s death in 2002.

For her retirement, she built “the house of my dreams” 14,000ft up beside Lake Titicaca where she could “see the sun rise over the Andes without getting out of bed”.

Given Bolivian citizenship in 1990, she became a roving ambassador for President Sanchez. In 1994 she wrote from Bolivia to The Telegraph, appalled that the Oxford & Cambridge Club had banished Misty, the club cat, on the orders of an environmental health officer.

In “retirement”, she tried to get a third development plan for Bolivia off the ground; chaired an expert panel for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations; and served on Jimmy Carter’s Council on Conflict Resolution. She joined peacekeeping exercises for the British Army, Nato and Latin American governments, usually playing a kidnapped UN representative.

She advised successive UN secretaries-general on post-conflict peace building, but confessed to having little faith in reform of the UN as long as the secretary-general was selected by political horse-trading.

Margaret Anstee was a vice-president of the United Nations Association. She held honorary degrees from Cambridge and other universities, and decorations from Bolivia, Morocco and Austria. She was appointed DCMG in 1994.

Her best-known books are Gate of the Sun (1970), about Bolivia, and her autobiography Never Learn to Type (2003).

Dame Margaret Anstee, born June 25 1926, died August 25 2016