This inducement, finally, hit the spot. My father, like most self-made men, craved public elevation; my mother longed for an invitation to the Palace. A knighthood, even an Order of the British Empire, amounted to temptation on a Faustian scale – strong enough, I feared, to pierce his moral armour.

A timely sunbeam split the dusty air as he shifted a mound of papers from the left side of his desk to the right. ‘Mr Horneymanffitch,’ said Mortimer Simmonds sweetly, ‘may I ask an undiplomatic question?’

‘By all means, Mr Simmonds.’

‘Before you joined the Permanent Secretary’s office, to which department of the Foreign Office were you attached?’

‘Near East and North Africa, sir,’ said the unsuspecting official, exhaling a smug cloud of Turkey’s finest.

‘And am I right that the Near East and North Africa department of the Foreign Office is responsible for the Palestine Question?’

‘Indeed it is, sir.’

‘It has been suggested that your department was firmly opposed to the formation of a Jewish state, and continues to support trade embargoes against the State of Israel.’

‘These are matters of public record, sir,’ said Horneymanffitch.

‘On another matter altogether,’ sighed Mortimer Simmonds, ‘am I correctly informed that, in the Near East and North Africa, it is not unknown for officials in your department to give baksheesh, or monetary gifts, to local dignitaries and functionaries to help oil the wheels of international understanding?’

Stripey-trousers could see where this was leading, but he had no means of escape. ‘I cannot comment on isolated incidents,’ he hedged, ‘but anything of that sort would be contrary to policy and subject to disciplinary action – although other European nations, less scrupulous than ours, do resort routinely to such practices.’

Mortimer Simmonds rose to his full five foot six. ‘Kindly tell the Permanent Secretary,’ he declared, ‘that his department has just compounded mendacity with hypocrisy. You, sir, have just offered me, in broad daylight, two authorised bribes, pecuniary and titular. Let me suggest that you now revert to regular departmental practice and go buy your tickets through a Lebanese arms dealer with contacts on the Piccadilly black market. Now, sir, I must ask you to leave. I have the French Minister of Culture on the line.’

Every word of that exchange is imprinted on my memory, for it was my father’s finest hour (to use the popular Churchillian phrase), and one of his last. Seeing the defeated toff off the premises, Mortimer Simmonds puffed his chest and felt he had scored a small victory for Mosaic rectitude over English compromise, desert rigour over drawing-room courtesies. Next morning, he dispatched a brace of complimentary tickets by special courier to the Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg embassies, and another pair to the Foreign Secretary, for his personal use. The French were offered two tickets at full price. My father’s view of cross-Channel relations had been forged in the First World War.