Horace Phillips (diplomat)
Sir Horace Phillips KCMG (31 May 1917 – 19 March 2004) was a British diplomat.
Phillips was born in Glasgow, Scotland. After seven years in the Army in the second World War, he served in a number of postings in East Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia from 1947 though 1977, the year he retired. He enjoyed a second career of ten years as resident representative of a major British engineering company afterwards. Famously, he was declared a persona non grata as the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1968 because he was of Jewish ancestry. Though it was widely reported in the media at the time that he was an "ex-Jew" or "non-practising Jew", he was in fact a member of a synagogue, and a religious Jew throughout his life.
In 1974, he was the British Ambassador to Turkey when Turkish military invaded Cyprus. He later returned to Turkey, where he had served for four and a half years as a diplomat (from 1972 to 1977), by joining the International Relations of Bilkent University in Ankara, lecturing until 1997, latterly on the history of diplomacy.
Phillips was the British Ambassador to Indonesia (1966–1968) and High Commissioner to Tanzania (1968–1972).
He was married to Idina, Lady Phillips (née Idina Doreen Morgan) for over 60 years. They had two children and four grown-up grandchildren, one of whom is the BBC correspondent Luisa Baldini.
He authored the book "Ihsan Dogramaci: A Remarkable Turk" in 1997.
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