Christopher Meyer, who presents the three-part ­television series accompanying this book, was our man in Washington during the run-up to the Iraq war. With his red socks, his auburn hair and his ­pinstripe swagger, he was more flamboyant than the average ambassador. After retirement he not only exposed Tony Blair’s toadying to George W Bush but purveyed waspish gossip about other prominent politicians. Trying to make Geoff Hoon engage with ­Donald Rumsfeld, he famously observed, was “like getting pandas to mate”. Such an outspoken official should be the ideal guide to the murky world of diplomacy that, Meyer remarks, “rivals prostitution as the oldest profession”.

Certainly he is not handicapped by false modesty. Meyer extols his own candour, reporting that he was complimented for giving straight answers to questions instead of the usual fudge. Moreover, as the star of the show, he intrudes himself unblushingly into the nine diplomatic episodes that make up this book. These range from Henry Killigrew’s embassy to Scotland in 1572 to the modern Bosnian crisis, and their purpose is to show how Meyer and his ilk have worked to secure Britain’s security and prosperity over the centuries.

So, having explained how, in 1815, Lady Castle-reagh helped her husband bring Europe peace for almost a century at the Congress of Vienna, Meyer adds a tribute to his own wife: “We were a partnership in the United States, as the Castlereaghs had been in Vienna.” Similarly, he reports that in 1876 Henry Elliot, British ambassador in Constantinople, repudiated charges of playing down the Turks’ Bulgarian atrocities in a spirited dispatch that, he says, “I could not have bettered myself.”

In fact, he does write well. His trenchant prose is unsullied by the managerial gobbledegook that has infected Whitehall. His tone is engagingly sardonic. He describes Downing Street advisers as fighting for favour like ferrets in a sack and warns against believing a prime minister who claims to dislike those who tell him what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, envoys abroad should heed the first law of diplomacy as formulated by that old China hand Sir Percy Cradock: “It’s not the other side you need to worry about but your own.”

He himself felt undermined vis-à-vis the White House by Blair who, in his passion to please Bush, failed to drive a hard bargain for Britain’s support against Saddam Hussein. Meyer, who believes that foreign policy should be determined by a hard-headed calculation of the national interest rather than by crusading zeal, calls Blair “the Messiah’s Messiah”.

Meyer ransacks history for other diplomatic precepts. Attachés should avoid illicit attachments, notably Russian honeytraps. Ambassadors should not exceed their instructions, as John Bowring did by initiating the second opium war with China in 1856. Nor should they “go native” — though Meyer does not cite the best examples, from the inter-war years, the pro-fascist Eric Drummond in Rome and the pro-Nazi Nevile Henderson in Berlin. Envoys bearing gifts are walking on eggs. When Meyer arranged to give the visiting Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko a valuable antique barometer he looked at it with bewilderment and then tried to play it like a balalaika.

As far as it goes, therefore, this is an admirable diplomatic primer. Conceivably, it might even realise Meyer’s ambition to strengthen the Foreign Office’s hand against an overweening No 10 and to inject more virility into its flaccid conduct of international affairs, typified, in his view, by Britain’s adoption of the hopelessly incoherent American policy in Afghanistan. He quotes George Canning aptly: we should not intervene overseas “except in great emergencies and then with commanding force”.

However, the book is unsatisfactory on other counts. Its stories are familiar and it adds little to our knowledge or understanding of, say, the Hoare-Laval Pact that tried to stop Mussolini invading Ethiopia in 1935 by ceding him chunks of its territory. Worse still, Meyer endorses this early instance of appeasement, whereas arguably Britain missed a golden opportunity to humble the Duce by denying his forces passage through the Suez Canal. Undoubtedly the British were outraged by Italian belligerence. But although Meyer acknowledges that morality is a key factor in the framing of foreign policy he thinks this too important to be left to the public “whim” — as manifested, for example, in opposition to the Iraq war, which he supported.

When balancing Realpolitik against an ethical foreign policy, Meyer equivocates with all the subtlety of his caste. He says that a little obsequiousness can do wonders for a diplomatic career, and sits exquisitely on the fence over whether Chris Patten should have introduced democratic measures in Hong Kong before handing it back to China. Behind his cavalier manner, it seems, Meyer is the silkiest of mandarins.

Getting Our Way by Christopher Meyer
Weidenfeld £18.99 pp320

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy