The Foreign Office: still fit for purpose?
The Foreign Office is “elitist and rooted in the past”. Not my words, said Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator, but those of some of the UK’s top ex-diplomats, as set out in a report published this week. The former mandarins, including one-time cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill, don’t hold back. The department, they say, is “struggling to deliver a clear mandate”, and too often operates “like a giant private office for the foreign secretary of the day”. It should be replaced by a new Department for International Affairs, which would handle all of the country’s overseas dealings, including trade, aid, cultural relations and the climate crisis. Its grand premises on Whitehall should also be updated, said Angus Colwell in the same paper, perhaps removing some of the colonial-era art, to “help create a more open working culture and send a clear picture about Britain’s future”.
Spare me this twaddle, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. These “pooh-bahs” are embarrassed by the very notion of British “greatness”. They believe we can no longer hack it as a major power and should instead model ourselves on Switzerland or Norway. In this, they represent the authentic voice of the Foreign Office, which has long been prone to “talking down Britain’s historic identity and the achievements of the West”. The former ambassador Tom Fletcher, who helped write the report, said he hoped it would kick-start a conversation about the reform of foreign affairs. “What it should kick-start is a conversation about the national self-loathing of the Foreign Office hive mind.”
There’s nothing wrong with a little realism, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. When, in 1859, Lord Palmerston insisted on a neo-classical Foreign Office building that would evoke the spirit of imperial Rome, Britain was at the height of its power; the very murals of the building “were meant to make the world quake”. We’re not a mighty empire today, so it makes sense to focus on our soft-power cultural strengths: universities, the arts, sport and the English language. “I recall on a visit to India being told that, in India’s eyes, the British Council outranked the Foreign Office.” As this week’s report notes, Britain is not a world power today, but an “offshore, mid-sized” country. “It should equip itself to behave like one.”