Sir Christopher Meyer: The man who believes quiet lobbying can change the world

On a bleak, late autumn morning in Washington, the next chairman of the Press Complaints Commission gazes out of the window with the air of a man whose mission is nearing its end. "What will I miss most here? The politics, the richest diet of politics in the world, endlessly fascinating. I'll miss a lot of people. I'll miss the sheer diversity of the place."

Christopher Meyer arrived as ambassador in Washington on Halloween in 1997. When he leaves next March to take over the commission, he will have held the foreign service's most coveted and glamorous posting for longer than anyone since Sir Ronald Lindsay, envoy from 1930 to 1939.

The ambassador's job, many say, has been short-circuited in this age of instant communication between leaders. If anything, the reverse is true – at least in this mighty diplomatic factory halfway up Massachusetts Avenue. A mini-Whitehall toils away in an embassy that resembles a 1950s trade union headquarters, housing the biggest concentration of British representative firepower on Earth. "When presidents and prime ministers speak, they cause a blinding flash of light," says Meyer. "But if you want total illumination on the job, it's up to us."

He is an engagingly unstuffy man, with a sharp smile and a quick laugh – and skilled in the diplomat's art of seemingly taking a reporter into their innermost confidence while imparting no secrets. Meyer, who has spent 36 of his near 59 years in the Foreign Office, is the archetypal high-flyer, who has served in the key missions of Bonn, Washington, Moscow and Brussels, with a stint as a top aide to a prime minister. He's adaptable too, an ambassador who defied many critics by proving as effective liaising with a Republican administration as when supposedly more congenial Democrats held the White House. Even his three years at Downing Street under John Major did not prevent Major's successor from sending Meyer to Washington – and keeping him there.

Indeed, Meyer was having a cup of coffee with Major at the embassy when the terrorists struck on 11 September last year. The world was stunned – and, to the delight of some in Britain and the scorn of others, Anglo-American relations went into overdrive.

"The argument as it comes through in the British press is ludicrously polarised," Meyer insists. "It either depicts Blair as Bush's poodle or claims that we have overweening influence. But neither is true." Oddly, in a 45-minute conversation, the phrase "special relationship" did not once crop up.

"The advantage we do have over other governments is that we track the inter-agency debate on issues here while it's moving." Britain in short knows what's going on in Washington, and can put across its views while policy is being formed.

But do access and knowledge add up to influence? Beyond argument, the biggest factor is chemistry at the top: Roosevelt/Churchill, Reagan/ Thatcher and now Bush/Blair. If the transatlantic relationship is, as this ambassador maintains, in as good a shape as it has been, that is largely due to the unexpected personal rapport between a savvy and determined Labour Prime Minister and a conservative Republican President mocked as a gun-toting simpleton.

Meyer reflects on their first meeting at Camp David in February 2001, the noted "Colgate summit", a month after Bush had taken office. (Asked what they had in common, Bush joked afterwards that they both used the same brand of toothpaste, helpfully provided in the Camp David lodges.)

In fact, Meyer explains, "the two men had never met, but each had been heavily briefed on the other. When we arrived we went straight into lunch. They agreed to call each other by their Christian names, and then it was, 'What shall we talk about?' No flim-flam, just straight down to business on the Middle East."

Then came the terrorist atrocities, and the Prime Minister's instinctive and instant support for a traumatised America. It was symbolised 10 days later by his presence in the guests' gallery of Congress, as Bush spoke urbi et orbi on the attacks. "11 September was the great accelerator," Meyer says.

"They have a strong sense of the practical, of how to get from A to B. I'm not sure it's religiosity, though both are church-goers. But in both men there's a very strong sense of moral purpose. This is a bonding mechanism. There's a bit of a parallel between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher."

To which the "poodle" camp would reply, so what? Blair's friendship has not secured any American focus on the Middle East, nor has it saved Britain from protectionist steel tariffs imposed by the United States this year, nor has it blunted the conviction of some in the administration that evicting Saddam Hussein will usher in a golden age of democracy in the Middle East, where Palestinians will lie down with Israelis and the people's voice will everywhere be heard.

Predictably, Meyer does not quite agree. His watchword, though he did not coin it, is "total support in public, total candour in private", and he cites three examples of quiet British lobbying to prove it: the prodding of the early Bush administration to engage seriously with Vladimir Putin's Russia, the pressure for a meaningful international peace-keeping force in Afghan-istan ("Isaf was a British intellectual creation," he says) and British insistence that Washington go the United Nations route on Iraq.

The in-house Washington battle for the President's mind was ultimately won by Colin Powell over a still sceptical Cheney/Rumsfeld camp. But, says Meyer, "insistently, month after month, we argued from the PM downwards that if there were to be war, we needed the largest international coalition. And the best way to mobilise that coalition was to make a last-ditch effort at the Security Council. It came out exactly as we wanted."

But what about the wider problem of runaway, uncontrollable US power? Meyer disputes the conventional wisdom that America has never been more dominant, a modern equivalent of imperial Rome. Instead, he points to the immediate post-Second World War period, when the concept of interdependence was almost non-existent, the UN had hardly been invented, and America alone had nuclear weapons.

"The current situation is not unique. Everybody writes about the US being the world's only superpower. But I think we've been there before. You talk as if the US were some kind of uncontrollable animal that has to be tamed, but that's absolute bunkum. We'll look back on 2002 as when the United States reinvested the UN with a sense of purpose. It's just done the same with Nato. We may see this some day as one of George Bush's legacies."

And if anyone understands what is happening, it should be the British, Meyer argues. "US policy reminds me of Britain's towards empire in the 19th century – both couched in moral terms." And, adds this student of big-power behaviour, "that's how you justify what you do".

As for the tug-of-war between unilateralism and multilateralism, it is as old as the Republic and its ingrained distaste for "entangling alliances". After all, it was under nice Bill Clinton, not tough-guy Bush, that the US came out against the International Criminal Court, rejected a ban on land mines, opposed Kyoto and refused to ratify the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Bush's policies may have been wrapped in harsher language, but they are not a departure. "We may not like them," says Meyer, "but we shouldn't be surprised."

Now the diplomat returns to head the PCC. It's a job he claims he is "looking forward to hugely". Indeed, so intrigued was he by the press that he wrote a thesis as a visiting fellow at Harvard in 1988-89, titled "Hacks and Pin-striped Appeasers; Selling British Foreign Policy to the Press". It contains his "10 Commandments" for dealing with the fourth estate, which may be summarised as: don't waffle, don't lie, be helpful and don't complain.

He is reticent on his intentions, but says: "Most important is that I am independent, and am seen to be independent from all the pressures". If anyone can do that, the charming, canny and battle-tested Christopher Meyer can.