Sir Christopher Meyer, who has died aged 78 of a stroke, served as John Major’s press secretary during the Conservative prime minister’s difficult “sleaze” years, and as UK ambassador to the US during 9/11 and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He will be best remembered for his indiscreet memoirs, DC Confidential, published in 2005 and serialised in the Guardian and Daily Mail, in which he produced a series of unflattering portraits of senior figures in the Blair government. It was unusual at the time for a civil servant to publish a book so soon after leaving government and to make such caustic personal remarks about ministers.
He spared Gordon Brown, then chancellor, and John Reid, a defence secretary, but said such capable ministers tended to be an exception and “stood out like Masai warriors in a crowd of pygmies”. Among those he was scathing about were the then foreign secretary Jack Straw, another defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and the deputy prime minister John Prescott. He ridiculed Blair’s Middle East envoy, Lord Levy, for having pretensions to be “a latter-day Kissinger”.
