Martin Le Quesne
British diplomat
Sir Martin Le Quesne KCMG (10 June 1917 – 3 April 2004) was a British diplomat, ambassador to Mali and Algeria and high commissioner to Nigeria.
Biography
Charles Martin Le Quesne, son of Charles Thomas Le Quesne, was educated at Shrewsbury School and Exeter College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Artillery 1940–45 and joined the Foreign Service in 1946. He served at Baghdad, Bahrain and Rome, and in the Foreign Office (later the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO), before being appointed chargé d'affaires in Mali when that country gained independence from France in 1960; subsequently he was Ambassador there 1961–64. After another post in the Foreign Office 1964–68, he was Ambassador to Algeria 1968–71. He was deputy Under-Secretary at the FCO 1971–74, with responsibility for Africa and the Middle East.
He became the senior official adviser on Rhodesia – a problem then poisoning Britain's relations with the black African states. He devoted his formidable intellectual energy to finding an honourable solution, but to no avail. The fruit was not yet ripe and it was only in 1979, after Le Quesne's retirement, that Lord Carrington brought off with great skill and courage the hitherto elusive settlement. — The Telegraph, 10 April 2004
Le Quesne was High Commissioner to Nigeria 1974–76.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin Le Quesne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.