Make Iran envoy a woman, says Labour MP

THE British ambassador to Iran should be a woman from an ethnic minority community, not a “white colonial” man, a Labour frontbencher has said.

Catherine West, the shadow foreign minister for Asia and the Pacific, said a Labour promise to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid would help to “flesh out” its “decolonisation agenda”.

The MP was asked at a Fabian Society conference earlier this month how a government under Sir Keir Starmer would diversify the UK’S diplomatic relations with Iran.

“Let’s change it. Let’s see if we can have an impact by sending a woman, maybe an ethnic minority woman, somebody who’s got a lot of charisma,”

Ms West told the conference, in comments leaked to The Daily Telegraph.

Ms West continued: “Rather than the sort of people who it looks like we were sending back when there were tobacco concessions in the 1800s because it does have a sort of a slightly old colonial feel to it, a white colonial feel to it.”

Simon Shercliff MBE, who has been Britain’s ambassador to Iran since 2021, is a white man and a highly respected mandarin, previously covering national security and counter-terrorism at the Foreign Office.

Last night, the comments attracted ridicule. Sir Ivor Roberts, the former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Ireland and Italy, said it was “a slightly bonkers view” from Ms West. “Sending a woman to be the British ambassador to Iran is a sure-fire means of our opinions being given even less importance or credence in Tehran,” he said.

“Out of 190 ambassadors around the world, most countries will be ethnically diverse from us, why should we only be sending ethnically diverse ambassadors to other countries – it’s crazy stuff.”

Sir Ivor added that Labour’s decolonising drive for foreign policy was “wokery gone mad”.

Ms West added in her speech to the Fabian Society, a socialist activist group, that current British global development policies for countries such as China are “old fashioned colonialism”.

A Labour spokesman said: “Labour has full confidence in the UK’S ambassador to Iran and we have immense respect for all FCDO staff.”