Charles Crawford

Over decades we destroyed our Foreign Office and its global work. Brexit means restoring it to former glory

What does it mean for a nation to exert “influence”? Partly it’s about attitude: the confidence and determination to push hard and long for national objectives. But it’s also about organisation: having the institutions, skills and discipline to turn foreign policy goals into real changes. Taxpayers might think the UK has that in hand, in the form of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) which commands the space between Downing Street and the Treasury. But those grand offices hide a momentous decline over the past four decades.

When I joined the FCO in 1979, the European Economic Community was an odd, distant formation where you dusted off A-level French for inconsequential meetings with bemused French and German embassy colleagues and disconcertingly confident European Commission zealots. Things changed. The legal power exerted by Brussels grew and grew. The EEC transformed into a European Community, then a European Union.

Cabinet Office coordination squeezed out the FCO’s lead on EU issues. Then, as a final humiliation, the Treasury grabbed the powerful job of the UK’s ambassador to the EU. Successive governments assured voters that the EU multiplied the UK’s influence, yet it was obvious that in key areas it diminished us, drawing us into laboriously negotiated but trivial consensus and skewing our diplomacy away from results and into process and symbolism.

Still, the erosion of our distinctive foreign policy by the EU was just one part of the FCO’s decline.

Back in the 1980s foreign aid was run by the Overseas Development Administration, a large team of officials who answered to the Foreign Secretary when they felt inclined to do so. Labour after 1997 created a new Department for International Development (Dfid) and committed it to spending 0.7 per cent of our gross national income. David Cameron bizarrely enshrined this into law, guaranteeing Dfid more and more public money every year, regardless of its record in spending it. So it has grown and grown, while the FCO has been cut and cut.

Historic diplomatic assets have been sold off to make savings which would be lost as rounding errors in other Whitehall budgets. It’s impossible to imagine any other country having an imposing ambassadorial residence in Whitehall but deciding to sell it and move into a smaller inconvenient house in Shepherd’s Bush – yet that is in effect what the UK has done in Warsaw, a signal that we don’t take ourselves (or our relations with Poland) seriously.

Meanwhile, unrelenting “progressive” reforms allowed nondiplomats in Whitehall to bid for British diplomatic postings. Teams were set up for tackling foreign policy issues but with no clear allegiance to any one ministry. Good British diplomats hopped over to the EU’s External Action Service, Brussels’ way of projecting a “European” foreign policy by marginalising the diplomatic activity of EU member states. Why not? Better money, and they were joining something growing, not shrinking.

Maybe worst of all, intelligent thought was replaced by junk “management”. For 20 years now, we have wasted incalculable time and money fretting over Strategic Priorities, Key Policy Goals and (now) Priority Outcomes. These processes were invented under Thatcher and Major to make government more “businesslike”, and accelerated absurdly under Blair and Brown.

Yet, after all this useless chuntering, there is still no consensus on what “business” foreign policy actually is. In fact it is a complex mix of different businesses: consultancy, farming (planting seeds of goodwill abroad), insurance (cultivating allies everywhere, just in case), fire fighting, and services (consular and visa work).

Because this work often shows no immediate measurable “outcomes”, it’s devalued in Whitehall calculations. In 2006-07 the EU section of our Warsaw Embassy mustered Polish support for the UK’s position against the EU Working Time Directive. This saved UK taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds. Treasury methodology allows no way to calculate that benefit, or to boost capacity in embassies so as to repeat it. Instead, we cut and devalue our embassies in Europe. It is madness.

All this and more has demolished the FCO’s effectiveness. Once one of the planet’s most respected, authoritative policy institutions, it is now a forlorn Prometheus upon whom Whitehall swoops for a tasty snack. Unlike Prometheus, the scrawny FCO does not grow back new flesh overnight.

But Brexit offers an extraordinary opportunity to regain our international confidence. The UK is far richer than Russia, our relationships around the world are more sophisticated, we are usually better analysts and we are equal in the UN. Still, between us, who looks and acts like a world power? Who gives the impression of believing power exists, and can be deployed for a national interest? Of having any national interest at all?

Part of the reason for our Brexit vote was a rejection of genteel declinism. Against Remain’s pessimism, the Leave campaign managed to capture the case for optimism and taking risks. So we can take advantage of Brexit only if we make radical changes, above all by uniting the spending of Dfid and the FCO in one Foreign Ministry. That would restore a strong, single foreign policy, uniting political and “development” objectives – and the officials pursuing them.