Alyson Bailes obituary

Alyson Bailes, who has died aged 67 of cancer, worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 33 years, both in London and as a diplomat in Hungary, West Germany, China, Norway and Belgium. She was British ambassador to Finland, 2000-02. However, as she herself put it, she “kept escaping for career breaks and different perspectives”. Her secondments included posts with the Ministry of Defence in London and Nato in Brussels. She was very proud of her work on Nato enlargement into eastern Europe, which she considered to be a major contribution to peace and stability.

She was never ambitious for rank for its own sake and her leadership of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute from 2002 until 2007, and her recent teaching roles, at the University of Iceland and the College of Europe, gave her the greatest satisfaction and achievement.

Her flair for languages was remarkable. She spoke and read French, Hungarian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish at what she herself described as “an operational level”. She also had reading knowledge of Danish, Icelandic, Faroese and Dutch. Sir Kim Darroch, British ambassador in Washington, describes her as “always the cleverest person in the room, and sometimes, when she was bored, she would admit to having been translating something from Hungarian into Mandarin just as a mental exercise to keep her brain occupied”.

He also noted Alyson’s steadiness and calmness: “I never saw her get angry or flustered. She was always extremely kind and never gave the impression of thinking ill of anybody.” This calmness under fire was tested in March 1979 when she was sitting next to the British ambassador Sir Richard Sykes when he was shot dead by Irish terrorists outside his home in The Hague. It was only by chance that she was in the ambassador’s car, as she had travelled to The Hague for meetings with Sir Edmund Dell and his team of “Three Wise Men” appointed by the European council to advise on institutional improvements in the European community before Greek accession. Alyson went on to speak at a press conference about the incident at the British embassy, then resumed her planned programme of meetings.

The eldest of three children of Barbara (nee Martin) and John-Lloyd Bailes, both of whom were teachers, Alyson was born in Liverpool and educated at the Belvedere school in the city. She went to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1966, aged 17, with a scholarship to read modern history, and graduated in 1969 with a first. In 2001 she was made an honorary fellow of the college.

She joined the Foreign Office as a junior diplomat in September 1969, having achieved full marks in the entrance exam. It was a very different world from today. All ambassadors were men (the first British female ambassador was appointed in 1976). Alyson’s duties as a junior diplomat included carrying coals for the open hearth fire which heated the office; and writing up policy documents in pen and ink, which would be copied out by typists using carbon paper. With her customary dry humour, she noted that “it was considered a sign of unusual keenness to arrive in the office before 10”.

A month after joining the FCO, she was interviewed by the Sunday Times and was asked whether there would ever be a female British ambassador? Would Alyson be Her Excellency in 20 years’ time? She replied that she couldn’t begin to imagine herself being that old: “But I suppose, by the time I am, I might be wanting to be an ambassador.”

In fact it was 30 years later that she took up her post as ambassador to Finland. By then there had been a dozen female ambassadors and high commissioners, but it was still relatively uncommon for a woman to get a top post in Europe. Now numbers have risen to more than 30 in top posts. Darroch believes Alyson could have been an ambassador earlier “if she had pushed herself more and played office politics.”.

As an expert on global defence issues, from 2011 until 2014 she was a member of the Trident Commission on UK nuclear weapons policy established by the thinktank BASIC. Its co-chair, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, said: “Very often you find that people who have been diplomats all their lives have become so used to giving a diplomatic answer on behalf of the government that they can’t do anything else. Alyson was different ... She didn’t just give an opinion; she was always trying to make progress to bring the two sides closer together and she had the skills to do this.”

As well as funny, generous and thoughtful, Alyson was interesting and interested, not only in diplomacy and international relations, but also in sci-fi (both books and films), embroidery, singing in choirs wherever she was posted, the novels of Dorothy Dunnett (she wrote articles for the Dorothy Dunnett Society), Icelandic heavy metal music and, most recently, heavy metal music from the Faroe Islands. This last was not an interest shared by her many friends.

She is survived by her mother, her brother, Martin, and her sister, Jane.