Pessimistic diplomat tries to make something optimistic happen: Annika Savill, Diplomatic Editor, assesses what drives Lord Carrington to continue his efforts for a peace agreement in the former Yugoslav states

ON Wednesday night, Douglas Hurd had a private meeting with Roland Dumas, his French opposite number. The Foreign Secretary, three weeks into Britain's presidency of the European Community, had stopped off in Paris on the way to his first visit to what was Yugoslavia. A French source gave the following account of the tete-a-tete: 'Hurd arrived declaring: 'I am the head of Europe now. There are a couple of questions I want to discuss with you, and the first is what we do about Lord Carrington's peace conference and your proposals for a different forum.' '

Mr Hurd went on to defend Lord Carrington's efforts: 'The man has always been a pessimist. He's always complaining that things aren't working. He said the same thing when he chaired the Rhodesian independence talks, but look how well that turned out.'

Indeed, only on Thursday night, Lord Carrington said after briefing John Major: 'I think the best thing to do is be pessimistic until something optimistic happens.' Mr Hurd belongs to a different school, and is fond of telling his staff things like 'who says we can't?'

Mr Dumas - who a week before had let slip that 'Carrington seems to have reached the end of his limit' - replied: 'We like Carrington. The problem is not Carrington the person at all. It is that we must do more at the same time, perhaps bringing in the UN Security Council.' But, French sources said, the people on the Security Council, too, had made clear to the French only a few days before that they still considered Lord Carrington's the main forum. As a result, Mr Dumas' protestations were more muted than before.

What, then, drives Lord Carrington at 73 to carry on despite the lack of teeth of his mandating body - the EC - despite the sniping comments from some of his mandators, and, above all, despite continuing carnage on the battleground? By early January, when he had been at work for four months, there had been 15 broken ceasefires in Croatia. Once the conflict moved on to Bosnia, everyone stopped counting.

Lord Carrington knows his conference risks being perceived as a forum whose main occupation is cobbling together fictitious ceasefires to delay deliberately what the Muslim Bosnians think they need: international military intervention. That perception is rendered especially unfortunate as the British government, fearful of its own public opinion, is the most adamant in opposing sending soldiers into the conflict; and if Britain can't send troops, it doesn't want anyone else to do so either, given that it wants to have a say in European defence structures. 'My worry is that the British, having their own problem, are trying to make their policy out to be the European policy,' said a Western diplomat.

Yet even this diplomat had to admit: 'It's not Carrington who needs the conference, it's the conference that needs Carrington. He's lent tremendous credibility to it.'

What drives Lord Carrington, even his critics insist, is a genuine, patrician sense of duty. Two months ago, he looked back upon his decision not to resign from public life after the Falklands: 'I wasn't dead, you know. One of the worst things that can happen to you is to be unemployed and have nothing to do. It doesn't take very long for you to realise that you have to get on with your life and if you are offered a job, you do it to the best of your ability.' He went on to defend his self-inflicted torture over Yugoslavia: 'You can't give up in the middle, just because things are difficult. If the EC foreign ministers want me to go on - of course they may not want me to - they may think somebody else could do it better. In which case, good luck to them.'

Since President Francois Mitterrand spent seven hours on the streets of Sarajevo last month, French diplomats have privately joked that Lord Carrington never ventured further than the airport. Journalists who were with him in Sarajevo say that this is not true; but that his image of the English gentleman may belie his actions. They recall one incident where he went round to the Muslim Bosnian headquarters and asked: 'Is there a good cellar?'

'For one awful moment, it sounded like he was asking if they had decent wine,' said one reporter. 'It took a few seconds to grasp he was in fact asking if they had decent shelter.'

It is not that Lord Carrington was the right kind of negotiator to deal with ex-colonials at Lancaster House, and the wrong kind of negotiator to deal with the Bosnians. It is that, as opposed to the future leaders of Zimbabwe, these people have no ambitions. In order to have statesmanlike negotiations, you need parties who reason that 'if we're going to build this kind of independent state there, we must have that kind of settlement here' or 'if I am going to be defence minister then, I must behave a certain way now'.

The people in this conflict may harbour political lusts, but what they want most of all is to carry on killing one another. The only 'right' kind of negotiator would be one who commands a bigger army.

That does not mean there is no point in Lord Carrington trying. The way ahead may lie, yet again, in seeking to prevent the conflict spreading. Many argue nothing can prevent it spreading to the Serbian province of Kosovo, but he is seeing the leader of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians in London on Monday.