Matthew Rycroft

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Matthew Rycroft CBE (1968 - ) is a British diplomat. As of 2006, he is the Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Rycroft was born in Southampton on 16 June 1968, before moving to Cambridge at the age of eleven. He studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford, and joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office upon graduation, in 1989. After short spells in Geneva and on the NATO desk in Whitehall, Rycroft spent four years at the British embassy in Paris. In 1995, Rycroft headed the Eastern Adriatic Department at the FCO: a demanding role, given the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars. Very soon after taking up this role, he served as a member of the British deputation to the Dayton peace talks.

In 1998, he joined the British embassy in the United States, where he served for four years. In 2002, Rycroft was appointed Private Secretary to Prime Minister Tony Blair, to advise him on matters related to foreign affairs, the European Union, Northern Ireland, and defence. It was in this capacity that Rycroft issued the Downing Street memo. Upon leaving his role in Downing Street, in 2004, he was made a CBE.

In March 2005, Rycroft was appointed to Sarajevo as Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina, before the explosion of publicity that resulted from the leak to the press of the Downing Street memo.

[edit] Downing Street memo

Rycroft's name became familiar to the general public as the author of a secret memo to British Ambassador to the United States David Manning, summarizing a July 23, 2002 meeting with Blair and other government officials "to discuss Iraq"[1]. The memo was leaked to The Sunday Times, who printed it on May 1, 2005.

The memo includes discussion of a "shift of attitude" in the Bush administration which made it appear that at this point, while the public was still being told that Iraq could avoid an invasion by agreeing to abide by UN resolutions,

"Military action was now seen as inevitable."

Furthermore, the memo went on to state,

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

bolstering the assertions of opponents of Bush and Blair that the invasion had been decided a priori, the intelligence to support the invasion had been slanted towards that purpose, and that there had been insufficient planning for the aftermath. This was even more explicitly stated elsewhere in the memo,

"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The effect in the United Kingdom was to support Blair's opponents' charges that he was a willing accomplice of Bush in an invasion they felt was in violation of international law, as well as the attempt to conceal it by deliberately misstating the true rationale and feeding the public's fears. Political analysts identify this memo as a "smoking gun" which is responsible for a large part of the reduction in Blair's margin of victory in the election which followed.

As yet, no individual has faced charges under the Official Secrets Act for leaking the Downing St Memo. There been neither a police investigation nor a civil service internal investigation.