Denis Keefe

„It’s interesting, when you think back to the eighties, if you ask most people in UK about ´68, their immediate reference would be to the events in France which frankly were far less significant but were somewhat more fashionable. I did know about 1968, I’ve been old enough – ten years old, and remember seeing the images on the TV. That was probably the only thing I did know about Czechoslovakia when they told me that it was where I was going to work. They had given me six months to learn the language before I arrived in Prague. So of course in those six months I have learned much more about the country.“

„The economic factor was very important but I think that it was a symptom of a wider failure. This system was just incapable of providing for people’s aspirations of any kind. And when things went wrong it was prone to resort to violence against its own people. It was just unsustainable. At that time [1989], of course, we were all fascinated by the speed and drama of what was happening. You could actually see people, physically crossing boundaries. But what lay behind this, was precisely this point: the communist system was unable to meet their aspirations and had reached the end of the road.“

"But in fact the whole point of the task I was given was that for various reasons, in the early eighties, the contact between Charta 77 and other dissidents and Western embassies, including our own, had been rather weak. And so there was a decision made in London that we needed to develop our contact with Charta 77, with the dissident world.It was really clear that the core task I had been given was to build up a better network of contact. That is what I spent my time in Prague doing. It was an enormously interesting and enormously powerful experience, which, I think, has left a mark on me for the rest of my life.“

„In the eighties, the number of British people at the embassy was roughly the same. It was about twenty, maybe twenty-two. But a large proportion of those people in the eighties were security guards or communication specialists – because it was very difficult for us to operate technically. The number of people doing diplomacy was very small. When I went back in the nineties, we didn’t need lots of guards and security people. We were able to operate openly and freely. And so we had more diplomats and could engage with a wider range of Czech society.“

„It [the Czech society] is in many ways different from English society. Although there are some things that are similar: the very ironic sense of humor is one thing we have in common. The whole Czech lifestyle based around country cottages is very important and quite different from anything in Britain. And, of course, it was very important from the point of view of contact with the dissident world, because many of the freest and most interesting conversations happened in a „chalupa, chata“ somewhere in the woods. Many conversations also happened in the basements of government buildings where somebody was working as a stoker.“