CHRISTOPHER MAKINS was a Foreign Office high-flyer who resigned in 1975, at the age of 32, to follow a career working for think-tanks and non-profit foreign policy organisations in Washington, becoming in the process an influential expert on Anglo-US and US- European relations and an authority on security, defence and disarmament issues.
In the early 1970s, in the view of his FCO colleagues, Makins had been the man most likely to emulate his hugely successful father, Sir Roger Makins, British Ambassador to Washington in the Eisenhower era. He seemed set fair to end his career as ambassador to Washington or Paris or to head the Diplomatic Service.
At the time of his resignation he was first secretary in the Washington Embassy handling politico-military affairs and had recently married Wendy Whitney Cortesi, acquiring two young stepdaughters.
His decision was taken after much agonising. He may have wished not to follow in his father’s footsteps, and his wife was not anxious to follow him around the world as a diplomatic spouse. But, most of all, he had become fascinated with the Washington scene, regarding the rest of the world as something of a political backwater.
His role in the embassy brought him in daily touch with the National Security Council (NSC), the State Department and the Pentagon, the movers and shakers of superpower policies.
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Washington was the place he felt most at home with his career and life, and the alternative was a ten-year slog up the Foreign Office ladder. The other consideration was his pride in and loyalty to the US through his American mother. He was adamant that he was just as American as British, but in accent, appearance and manners he was a quintessential old-school Englishman.
After leaving the Foreign Office and acquiring US citizenship, his first job was with the Trilateral Commission, formed by private citizens of Japan, Europe and North America to foster closer co-operation among these core industrialised areas of the world.
There he became a friend and colleague of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the foreign affairs expert who would be President Carter’s NSC adviser. It was a disappointment to Makins that Brzezinski did not take him with him into the NSC — this would have given him the chance to partake in serious policy making. Instead, from behind the scenes, he became an expert on Anglo-US and US-European relations, and established a huge range and depth of Washington connections, Democrat and Republican, although his sympathies were with the Democrats.
One of his objectives was to promote meetings and policy discussions between influential US, British and European statesmen and experts. He was, as one colleague said, absolutely the right man to get together an Aspen or Ditchley conference, to see the right people were there and the right questions asked. He was, said another colleague, more of a policy expert than a politician, who had a calming influence over international tensions when the going got rough.
Makins’s grandfather was a general and hero of the Boer War. In 1964 he inherited the title of his father, the lst Lord Sherfield, but neither used it nor renounced it. His mother, Alice Davis, was the daughter of Dwight Filley Davis who established the Davis Cup tennis competition.
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Makins went to Winchester, took a first at New College, Oxford, in 1963, became a Fellow of All Souls College at 21, and was somewhat dauntingly bright.
He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1964, serving in London, Paris and Washington. After working for the Trilateral Commission, the Carnegie Endowment for International peace and the German Marshall Fund of the US, he spent four years as vice-president of the Roosevelt Centre.
In 1989 he joined the Aspen Institute, playing an important part in the development of partner institutions in Europe and Asia. He was the driving force behind the Marshall Sherfield Fellowships established by his father so that young scientists and engineers could undertake research in Britain.
From 1999 to 2005 he was president of the Atlantic Council of the United States. In 2002, with the approach of the Iraq war, he helped to write a much-discussed report detailing differences in European and American views of the Middle East and was opposed to the invasion of Iraq without full United Nations approval.
Makins was a well-known character in Washington and in Georgetown where he lived. A gangly figure, with a long stride, a loud voice and a booming laugh, he was a tremendous enthusiast. He loved his sports car and his speedboat, took a strong interest in art, baseball, theatre and opera, liked party games and was unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit.
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He was president of the boards of the Phillips Collection and the Washington Concert Opera. He had probably the best private collection, after Lloyd Webber, of pre-Raphaelite works of Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt. He is survived by his wife, a daughter and two stepdaughters.
Christopher Makins, diplomat, was born on July 23, 1942. He died from cancer on January 28, 2006, aged 63.