Having abandoned the interception of foreign correspondence, some British statesmen were naive about foreign interception of their own correspondence. Perhaps the most naive was William Ewart Gladstone, whose four terms as Prime Minister (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886 and 1892-4) are still a record. On one occasion while on holiday in Cannes during his second term as Prime Minister, Gladstone asked a friend to write the address on the envelope of a letter which he sent to the Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville - confident, he told Granville, that, if the French authorities failed to recognize his writing on the envelope, they would not bother to open it. Granville replied in some exasperation that the mere fact that a letter from Cannes was addressed to the Foreign Office was enough to attract the attention of the cabinet noir. 'You would', he told Gladstone, 'have been a good clergyman, a first-rate lawyer and the greatest of generals, but you would have been an indifferent Fouché in dealing with the Post Office.'
