Subsequently, he served as British Ambassador to Poland, Germany and finally France, from which post he retired in 1979 on his sixtieth birthday.
Upon retiring (as he thought) from the foreign service when relinquishing his post in Paris, he wrote a final dispatch titled "Britain's decline; its causes and consequences".
The Economist obtained a copy and printed it in the same year, stating "The despatch does not, needless to say, reach us from him and was presumably written for very limited circulation.
But it is so unusually forthright and timely, particularly in its middle and concluding passages on British policy in Europe, under governments of every stripe, as to merit publication virtually in full.
In particular, he was successful in putting forward the British side of the Falklands War in 1982, and maintaining friendly relations between the nations when that friendship was under some strain.