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Canadian diplomat and future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson was having a really bad day. It was 1939, the Second World War was only a month old and Pearson – stationed at Canada’s High Commission in London – turned to his diary to complain about his boss, Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
He did so because PM King was continually sending telegrams marked “top secret” to His Majesty the King.“Is our PM breaking up?” Pearson wrote in his diary. “He sent a super-sealed double-enclosed letter to the High Commission marked ‘Secret-Urgent-Most Immediate.
I told my friends at the Palace that we had had similar difficulty, but that my diplomacy was not, I feared, equal to the task of drafting a message from Canada House telling a Prime Minister not to be so verbose without offending him. I did, however, try to compose a tactful telegram suggesting that prime ministerial message which did not require a high war-security classification should be sent in ordinary code.
The High Commissioner , however, who had to see and sign all messages, decided that this one might better be filed than dispatched. No doubt he was right.”Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.
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