Diplomacy and candour

Published : Sep 09, 2011 00:00 IST

The strains and perils of diplomatic conduct in the British Diplomatic Service exposed through despatches and personal accounts.

SUPERFICIALLY, he appears to be an endangered species. But the diplomat will survive. No survivor is more adept at the art of survival than he, whether it is the strains and perils of diplomatic conduct or the whim and caprice of the pompous, garrulous politician, the ignorant Foreign Minister, at home.

The first book should be read by students of diplomacy, Right to Information activists, babus who resist transfer of files to the National Archives of India and, not least, those who disparage diplomats. The second book should be read by those diplomats who win note for arrogance and boorishness, unredressed by worth or talent and aggravated by the time-honoured traits of survivors obsequious to superiors, devious with equals, and overbearing to subordinates.

Over the centuries, the British Diplomatic Service had the practice of the Valedictory Despatch, written by the Ambassador as he prepared to leave the post, whether on transfer or retirement. It was ended in 2006 by an inept and vengeful upstart, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. She professed to be shocked at remarks in a despatch about the bullshit bingo of the new management consultancy culture in Whitehall, which were leaked to the press. Her own language was no better. These despatches, circulated in confidence in the Foreign Office (F.O.) and to some posts abroad, were avidly read for elegance of language, wit and depth of insight, and for remarks which verged on the scandalous. Readers did not spare the writer if his missive was dull, boring or reeked of self-pity or self-importance.

Mathew Parris worked for the F.O., became a Conservative MP, joined The Times as a parliamentary sketch writer and is now one of its better columnists. He abandoned the F.O. when he came across a despatch. The F.O. was merged with the Commonwealth Office in 1968 to become the FCO.

Andrew Bryson, a BBC producer, read a column on Valedictory Despatches by Mathew Parris in The Times and The Spectator and contacted its writer. He offered to track down the despatches by invoking the Freedom of Information Act, 2000. In the last Chapter entitled Notes on the Material: Freedom of Information and the National Archives', Bryson describes how he went about the job, piercing through the qualified exceptions in the Act; such as formulation of government policy, international relations between the U.K. and any other state, international organisation or court, and protection of the free and frank provision of advice and exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation.

Bryson requested the F.O. for nearly 60 valedictories between 1979 and 2006 and, surprisingly, received 40. Some were deemed too sensitive to release. Sir Christopher Meyer's parting shot from Washington in 2003 was withheld. His 1997 valedictory from Bonn was, however, released.

Most of the despatches that emerged from the process were censored with some sections obscured, commonly because of the exemption regarding international relations. The Foreign Office seemed particularly sensitive about releasing despatches written by ambassadors to conservative societies. One valedictory from Jordan (Peter Hinchcliffe, 1997) bore some particularly heavy redactions and another from Saudi Arabia (Sir James Craig, 1984) was withheld outright. In both cases the Foreign Office wrote me a letter which made much of the need to maintain trust and confidence' in relations with the countries concerned. They seemed more relaxed about hurting the feelings of other mature liberal democracies when assessing the material for release; Lord Moran's wonderfully scathing 1984 valedictory from Ottawa being a case in point.

Robin Renwick's (now Lord Renwick) final telegram from Washington in 1995 bore some particularly swinging partial edits which were fatal to the meaning. The Ambassador began a section with some remarks on the first George Bush: As President, he was an anomaly, devoting two thirds of his time to foreign affairs. The next three or four sentences, however, were redacted. Renwick served in the British High Commission in New Delhi in the late 1960s. He pompously asserted that the decision to nationalise banks would fail. It did not.

Sir Robin Fearn, Ambassador to Spain, retired in 1994. So thorough is the research that the authors tracked the obituaries for clues to skills and eccentricity. Fearn once set fire to his suit while giving a lecture to other diplomats, having absent-mindedly put his lit pipe into his pocket. It all sounded promising.

The F.O. released the despatch, and most of the document passed the censors relatively unscathed. But the final three sections are entirely obscured with the thickets of marker pens. Clues in an earlier passage indicate that much of the missing text concerns the tussle between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar. Whatever Fearn had to say on the issue in 1994 obviously still retains a charge today. The centuries-old dispute burst into the open three years after his retirement, with Spain making a fresh demand for joint sovereignty. In 2002 Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, actually agreed to back the idea, subject to an eventual referendum. The idea was roundly rejected by 98 per cent of Gibraltarians in a poll hastily organised by enterprising local officials and the plan was quickly dropped. In Gibraltar, however, it is the people who have, in truly free and fair elections, consistently voted against merger with Spain.

The despatches also contained rants about foreigners, living conditions and the F.O. itself. Some were colourful tirades. In 2009, the F.O. received 1,136 requests under the FOI (Freedom of Information) Act, roughly three a day.

Would our Central Information Commission (CIC) ever allow similar requests? On past form, most unlikely. It rejected a very reasonable request for the disclosure of the Henderson Brooks Report (1963) on the debacle in the war with China, on spurious grounds. Neville Maxwell has a copy of the report and indicated as much in an article under the revealing title Henderson Brooks Report: An Introduction ( Economic & Political Weekly, April 14, 2001). He writes: Its main section, excluding recommendations and many annexures, covers nearly 200 foolscap pages.

Nonetheless, the CIC, then headed by Wajahat Habibullah, rejected the request. It appears that the applicants did not cite that article. The decision is no less faulty for their apparent lapse. The Government of India's archives policy is more illiberal than those of China and Russia. Access to files of the Simla conference of 1914 and to documents on the McMahon Line is barred. They are freely available in the British Library in London and have been freely quoted by scholars, Indian and foreign.

Section 8(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, lists the exemptions. Sub-Clause (a) covers information, disclosure of which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the state, relations with a foreign state. The law is applied by judges and members of tribunals. A lot depends on the breadth of their outlook. Most despatches in the volume, in all probability, would have been barred in India because they contain sharp criticism of behaviour in foreign countries. The italicised phrase was added to Article 19 (2) of the Constitution as a restriction on the right to freedom of speech, at the instance of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself. It deserves a careful review now.

There are, besides, first impressions despatches and annual reviews. Mathew Parris writes an introduction. Candour is (I found) a quality encountered in refreshing quantity everywhere in the Diplomatic Service but only in private between consenting adult colleagues. Privately, ambassadors love shooting from the hip, many being the very opposite of the bland diplomats whom you might imagine handing out chocolates. Some were incredibly brutal and rude about people and events. The way the Foreign Office worked it seems to be for hundreds of years is [to display] the most brutal frankness on paper.' The valedictory can be the finest flowering of that.

These days, means of communication have changed. Ambassadors write fewer formal despatches; communication by secure e-mail is used, with encrypted messages taking moments to reach Whitehall rather than weeks, as the old diplomatic bag might. And with the advent of social media, diplomats now blog and tweet.

When Parting Shots was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, the British Ambassador in Bangkok issued a statement dissociating himself and his government from his predecessor's remarks. In Nigeria it seems there were no repercussions following our quotation of a valedictory from Lagos in which our departing Ambassador wrote that Nigerians had a maddening habit of always choosing the course of action which will do the maximum damage to their own interests. They are not singular in this: Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery'.

Time was when a British Ambassador wrote to the F.O. that one of the Vice-Consuls under his charge does not, I much regret to report, take care of his health which his medical advisers would recommend. The official was, in fact, in the last stages of delirium tremens. Not all show such restraint. John F. Kennedy walked out as Pakistan's Ambassador Aziz Ahmed launched a tirade against India. He might have waited and delivered to the notorious boor the classic rebuke Sparta's leaders delivered to a visiting mission from the island of Samos: We have forgotten the beginning of your harangue; we paid no attention to the middle of it, and nothing has given us pleasure in it except the end.

Harold Nicolson, remarks in his classic Diplomacy that the worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers; the best kind are reasonable and humane sceptics. Parris adds that the best kind of sceptics are indeed reasonable and humane; the worst kind (and the FCO is not without examples) are aloof, dismissive and blinkered by a notion of the national interest that can be self-defeatingly narrow and short-term. The knee-jerk Whitehall response, gone native', can be less clever than it sounds. This collection of valedictories offers an antidote.

Sir Peter Jay's valedictory, as he departed Washington in 1979, turned its guns upon his own country, and began, Our world is dying, and its death is being hastened by errors and myopia in our own ranks. Sir Nicholas Henderson (How poor and unproud the British have become') had in one magnificent sweep surveyed the relative decline of modern Britain and perhaps unwittingly set its author up, as its turned out, to be brought back by a new Prime Minister in Downing Street for the most important role in his career.

Our book as it was emerging in our minds and from the material Andrew was amassing, would uncover some of the more notable essays on modern politics, economics and diplomacy to emerge over the last half-century; many of them important even at the time among the small private audience for which they were written. We were to uncover some of the silliest, too. Now a wider audience would see them all. A few may be quoted here.

Sir John Thomson, High Commissioner to India, wrote on June 21, 1982: India has become fashionable, yet few people in the West understand the realities in this country. The truth is elusive, never more so than in India, but some recognition of the good and the bad aspects of modern India is essential to the formulation of sensible policies.

The bad things are more familiar than the good. An appallingly large population increase a high and growing level of corruption. Communal rioting occurs in many parts of the country, law and order are slow and precarious and there are serious doubts about the honesty of the police. The situation in educational institutions, including many of higher learning, seems likely to perpetuate these deplorable conditions. It is not uncommon for a thousand students to have been detected cheating in the exams of a single university.

It is not surprising that such blemishes in the ethos of Indian society are reflected in the physical environment. Her children have inflicted ugly scars on the face of Mother India. Half or more of all the trees in India have been cut in the past 35 years with frightful consequences for soil erosion, silting, flooding and climatic conditions. Following the felling of their forest homes, many of the 40 million or so tribal people are in a pitiable condition and the situation of the urban slum dwellers is degrading.

A successor, David Gore-Booth, son of a previous High Commissioner, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, fell foul of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and resigned. His valedictory was bitter. At first, social Delhi a formidable force queued up to congratulate London on having finally accepted the dynastic principle. Later, as things soured after the 1997 election and the ensuing state visit [of the Queen], socialites wrote off socialists and began taking pot shots at Her Majesty's messenger. The Indian press is commendably free, but it abuses that freedom to make mincemeats of personalities. I have never held a rein, a gun or a rod in my life yet I am regularly described here as a hunting, shooting, fishing aristocrat of a type inconsonant with Labour, old or new.

As I learned during the Scott [Inquiry] Report saga, the British press is not less proficient than its Indian counterpart at creating stereotypes only to demolish them. One of the great failures of the Diplomatic Service has been its inability to cast off its image as bowler-hatted, pin-striped and chinless, with a fondness for champagne. It does not help when Ministers earn themselves a cheap thrill by colluding in the notion that the FCO is elitist and fuddy-duddy. Or that Eton is a dirty word. A Foreign Office Career is one of the best levellers upwards or down that has been devised. Whoever it was who suggested an intentional treaty banning National Day receptions should be canonised. No civil servant should be put in a position where he or she is pilloried in public and mimicked on the radio, TV and stage without the chance to defend him or herself. The gradual erosion of trust between officials and Ministers is one of the saddest consequences of the dumbing down of the media and the focus on personalities as opposed to policies. If the doctrine of ministerial responsibility is to be so blatantly prostituted then civil servant will have to man their own ramparts for rightful remedy. I believe that, as a first step, the Diplomatic Service Association (which I hope will soon be open to all who accept the mobility obligation) should retain the services of a lawyer. He, or she, should advise Foreign Servants on how to protect their fronts and their rears.

The High Commissioner to Barbados, David Roberts, sketched a situation by no means unique. It is now the exception rather than the rule for a young and outstanding Barbadian to be educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Thus, through death, retirement or more lucrative employment, the generation of men who read greats, economics or law in the U.K., acquired an affinity with our way of thinking and an acceptance of our social values, and came home to govern Barbados, will pass away. They will leave government in the hands of young men educated at the University of the West Indies, from which a half-naked intelligentsia is already coming forward. The new generation have largely been instructed by university teachers who could not hold down a reputable job elsewhere. A small country which badly needs carpenters, plumbers, engineers and so forth is turning out third-rate lawyers and sociologists by the dozen. It is good inflammable material for a political bonfire.

One must end with the missive that provoked Margaret Beckett to end the practice. It was the Ambassador to Italy Sir Ivor Robert's valedictory in September 2006. Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews, skills audits, zero-based reviews and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about? Why have we failed so signally to explain to the likes of the Cabinet Secretary that well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured because diplomatic successes are more often than not elusive or ephemeral? The diplomat is condemned to a Sisyphean task in which as(s) he attempts to grapple with one conflict another breaks out. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed we should be sceptical of permanent' solutions or models: think democracy in the Middle East or war on terror. Diplomacy is the classic example of the Spanish proverb, Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.' We need to keep flexible and innovative and be less worried about strategic priorities which may need to be displaced at short notice or added to with no commensurate additional resources. Priorities and objectives have their place, clearly. But an excess of them smacks of a command economy with its long and inglorious pedigree.

Change management is a means not an end. Our prime purpose should remain objective, trenchant foreign policy advice. We used to be better at this. Overloading the successor to the Planning Staff with the responsibility for the process of change management seems to me a serious mistake. DSI [Diplomatic Service Inspector] should be writing incisive think pieces such as Iraq: How did we get into this mess and how to extricate ourselves'. Or Why are we so hated in the Middle East and what we should do about it'. Or Balkan map-making: Time for a new Congress of Berlin?' It's been an excellent initiative to bring together senior ambassadors from around the world twice a year, but it would make better sense, even if occasionally uncomfortable for the home team, if we were allowed to debate foreign policy rather than corporate governance.

Too much of the change management agenda is written in Wall Street management-speak which is already tired and discredited by the time it is introduced. Synergies, vfm [sic], best practice, benchmarking, silo-working, roll-out, stakeholder, empower, push-back and deliver the agenda, fit for purpose are all prime candidates for a game of bullshit bingo, a substitute for clarity and succinctness.

There are despatches from ambassadors to the Soviet Union in its declining years and one to Russia the first since 1917. Also by ambassadors to China like Sir John Adds, who wrote a paper at Harvard in 1962 on the India-China boundary.

Ross' memoir

Carne Ross served in the F.O. for more than 15 years and rose to high positions. He found Britain's stand on the Iraq war, as that of the United States, manipulative and dishonest and resigned. In 2004 he founded Independent Diplomat, a non-profit advisory group. But not before testifying before the Butler Inquiry. His testimony served as his letter of resignation to the Foreign Secretary.

He had read a lot during a sabbatical and concluded that he had no taste for the job. There is something wrong in the state of diplomacy. The book lists eight related problems it is not democratic and lacks transparency; amoral behaviour is encouraged because the state has no morality; the people accept this passively; self-interest predominates; problems call for a collective approach but that realisation is absent; the discourse of diplomacy is flawed gravely and is unreal; the diplomat's conceit that the world is comprehensible; and rich and powerful states run the machinery.

What follows is a diplomatic memoir laced with sharp comments. Independent Diplomat was set up to remove the diplomatic deficit: The idea was to establish a network of experienced practitioners (former diplomats, international lawyers and skilled analysts) whose expertise would be available to help small, inexperienced or under-resourced countries and political groups with their diplomacy a diplomatic service for those who need it most.

He writes: I began work in the basement of my flat in south London in the autumn of 2004. Independent Diplomat's first contract, signed early the next year, was with the Government of Kosovo, to help advise it during the U.N.-supervised process that would determine the province's final status. Kosovo, technically still part of Serbia though governed separately by the U.N. since 1999, was not allowed any diplomatic representation or a foreign ministry, yet it was required to participate in a complex and highly charged diplomatic process involving many diplomatic actors (to start with the, U.N., the E.U. and the six countries of the Contact Group who dominate south-east European diplomacy, as well, of course, as Serbia itself).

The philosophy of Independent Diplomat is straightforward. We work for our clients. Unlike many other NGOs or international agencies, we are simply at the disposal of the countries and groups that choose to use us. We try to help our clients, through advice and assistance with diplomatic tools to achieve their international goals. There is only one important condition. All those we help must be democratic and respectful of international law and human rights. No country is perfect in this regard, but the board of Independent Diplomat, which scrutinises all prospective projects we undertake, must be convinced of the general direction of travel' of our potential clients, On this ground, we have turned down several groups and countries that have approached us. Our hope is that by helping countries and political groups to use the existing international machinery and international law we are helping reinforce peaceful and lawful means of arbitrating international business.

Our work for our clients consists of behind-the-scene strategic advice as well as practical assistance with things like communications to the U.N. Security Council, speeches or formal diplomatic presentations. We don't represent our clients diplomatically or lobby for them. I always felt that the sight of a sharp-suited westerner lobbying for a far away group in the corridors of Washington or New York was unconvincing: it spoke more of money than integrity. In any case, having been on the receiving end of such lobbying before, I concluded that the people themselves of a country or region were the most convincing advocates of their own cause.

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