ADRIAN FORTESCUE started his career as a gifted British diplomat who might have gone far in his country’s service. But he seemed to find greater fulfilment when he transferred, via a tour of duty in the late 1980s as chef de cabinet to a British European Commissioner, Lord Cockfield, to the permanent service of the European Commission. This culminated, after he had left Lord Cockfield’s office, in four years as the Commission’s Director-General for Justice and Home Affairs.
Adrian John Fortescue was born in Hong Kong in June 1941, the son of a colonial servant, Tim Fortescue, who later in life made a career in politics, serving in Parliament for eight years. Six months later, the Japanese Army arrived in Hong Kong and Fortescue spent the first four years of his life in ill-nourished and precarious internment.
Back in England after the war, he was educated at Uppingham School and King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated in classics. In 1964 he joined the Diplomatic Service.
At once, Fortescue was shipped off to Lebanon to learn Arabic at the Foreign Office’s language school at Shemlan in the hills above Beirut, and then to Amman, to put his newly acquired linguistic skills to diplomatic use. But soon he was brought back to London, and then embarked on a career which kept him (with one short excursion into Eastern Europe) in the inner circle of Western capitals for the rest of his career. By 1972 he was serving in the embassy in Paris under Lord Soames.
Throughout his career Fortescue combined great ability with tact, charm and good looks, and it was no surprise that, when Britain at last entered the Common Market on January 1, 1973, Soames, on becoming one of Britain’s first two commissioners to the European Community, took him with him to Brussels as a junior member of his cabinet.
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Fortescue stayed with Soames in Brussels for two years and then, after three years in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was posted to Washington. First Paris, then Brussels and now Washington seemed to mark him out for an ascent to the heights, something that seemed to be confirmed when, in 1981, he was promoted and put in charge of the unit responsible for the management of Britain’s six-month presidency of the European Community. It was an arduous task, in which Fortescue gave full satisfaction. His employers may have concluded, however, that it was time for him to take his turn with the rough as well as the smooth and, after training him in Hungarian, posted him as Counsellor to the embassy in Budapest.
In 1978 Fortescue had married Jillian Montague-Evans, but the marriage did not prosper and he went to Budapest alone. As a grass-widower, he found the constraints of a small embassy in what was still a hostile communist country oppressive. He wanted to cut the posting short but the Service wanted to benefit from its investment in his language training; he was saved from what might have become a collision with the authorities by an invitation from Lord Cockfield to serve as his chef de cabinet in the Commission in Brussels.
Fortescue stayed with Cockfield for three years. He was not an easy man to serve, and he tried Fortescue’s patience mightily. But in his obsessive way Cockfield was pressing the European Community towards the creation of the single European Market, a major step forward in the Community’s development and one of the few for which Britain could claim a large share of the credit.
Interpreting Cockfield to the Commission and the Commission to Cockfield, Fortescue did much in these years for the Community. He also advanced Briain’s reputation in Brussels. The experience added to his make-up something which had hitherto seemed lacking: a toughness of spirit to complement the intellectual and personal qualities he had already exhibited.
When he left Lord Cockfield’s office Fortescue stayed on in the Commission. His first marriage having been dissolved, in 1989 he married a Belgian lawyer in the Commission’s service, Marie Wolfcarius. In Brussels he steadily climbed the Commission ladder, grappling with one of the European Union’s issues of the moment after another.
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By 1994 he was a deputy director- general, dealing with some of the expected consequences of the Union’s enlargement to the east which came to fulfilment in 2004, the thorny issues of frontier controls and immigration among them. In 1999 he was promoted to director-general, with responsibility for justice and home affairs. He became, in short, a fully-paid up member of that small group of senior European public servants who have done so much to create an effective, rounded bureaucracy in the service of the European Union, to so little acclaim in Britain.
In all Fortescue worked in the European Commission for almost 20 years. In retrospect it is clear that he was more at home there, and achieved more in its service than he might have done if he had remained in the peripatetic service of British diplomacy.
He retired early last year, and took up a fellowship at Harvard, where he made a study of the US Homeland Security Department. He was appointed LVO in 1974 and KCMG in the last New Year Honours.
Fortescue is survived by his second wife, by the son of his first marriage and by the stepdaughter of his second.
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Sir Adrian Fortescue, KCMG, LVO, diplomat, was born on June 16, 1941. He died of an asthmatic attack on August 17, 2004, aged 63.