On his first day in his new job William Hague stood outside the main entrance to the Foreign Office and set out his priorities. But he missed off his list one of the most serious problems he faces. At the top he had Britain\u2019s special relationship with the United States, with particular regard to Afghanistan; next came good relations with the countries of Europe; and then a new emphasis on building relationships with countries in south Asia, north Africa and Latin America where the economic action will be in the decades to come. All fine and apt. But there is something far nearer home that should concern him.<\/p>\n
For centuries the word diplomacy has been synonymous with subtlety, finesse, tact, sinuous guile and crafty negotiation. British diplomats were long regarded as masters of the delicate art. Until, that is, an official Foreign Office team three months ago produced a document of proposals for the visit of the Pope to the UK in September \u2013 which suggested he should open an abortion ward, launch his own brand of papal condoms, bless a \u201cgay wedding\u201d \u2013 and, in pursuit of the climate change agenda, persuade God to make trees fall on illegal loggers.<\/p>\n
This seemed the total obverse of diplomatic discretion. Indeed it was branded by serving and retired ambassadors as \u2013 among other things \u2013 crass, scabrous, sneering, puerile, shameful and staggeringly stupid. It produced an unprecendentedly grovelling apology from the Foreign Secretary to the Vatican. But above all it opened a little window into the soul of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. How could Britain\u2019s diplomats have become so undiplomatic?<\/p>\n
At first many, inside and outside the FCO head office in King Charles St, assumed it was a joke, the latest manifestation of the irreverent wit that has characterised the Foreign Office over the years. But it was not a premature if misguided April Fool\u2019s joke. It turned out to be a serious brainstorming document written by the Foreign Office\u2019s official Papal Visit Team and sent out to 35 officials in other government departments.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not a wind-up,\u201d one senior official in the Foreign Office told me. \u201cIt was supposed to be the basis for discussion on the ideal things the government would like from the visit. Had it been a joke the FCO would have used it as an excuse when we sent the British Ambassador to the Vatican into the Pope\u2019s people to apologise. But everybody knew it wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few years ago I was seconded from The Independent<\/em> to work for six months for Tony Blair\u2019s Commission for Africa. In that I time I had dealings with many senior diplomats and civil servants in the Foreign Office, Treasury, Department for International Development and in 10 Downing Street. What was striking about them was their high intellectual calibre, their dedication and their moral seriousness. But a number of clues emerged about the kind of changes which have brought about the present debacle, which goes well beyond the handling of the papal visit. It is that to which William Hague must now turn his attention.<\/p>\n The culture of the Foreign Office began to change as part of the modernisation project that began a decade not long after the electoral landslide that brought Tony Blair to power. New Labour saw the civil service as lumbering, hide-bound and innately pro-Conservative after 18 years of Tory government. It determined to drag Whitehall into the modern age. \u201cThere was a greater focus on outcomes,\u201d said one Foreign Office insider, responsible for a department of 70 officials. \u201cThere was greater attention to diversity. It was decided to push people through their career faster to retire older diplomats, which also saved money.\u201d Staff were given responsibility at a much younger age. Ambition was encouraged.<\/p>\n \u201cIn embassies,\u201d one recently retired ambassador says, \u201cwe stopped wearing ties round the office and insist on the staff calling us by our first names \u2013 which some local staff still aren\u2019t comfortable with.\u201d In the department\u2019s headquarters in King Charles St a Dress-Down Friday was introduced where young men in jeans and open-necked shirts would arrive in reception to greet smartly-dressed diplomats from smaller countries who must have wondered what had happened to this once-august institution<\/p>\n The Cabinet Secretary, at the behest of Tony Blair, brought in huge numbers of management consultants, all across Whitehall. In came business jargon \u2013 blue-skies thinking, organograms, flow-charts, spidergraphs, syngery and silos \u2013 and a great emphasis on presentational style.<\/p>\n But when the old-fashioned ponderous style went so did some of the better instinctive qualities. \u201cEsprit de corps has attenuated and been replaced by individuals pushing their careers forward,\u201d says one former head of department. \u201cThe FCO\u2019s naturally collaborative way of working has gone.\u201d Decorum, manners, respectability are all less important, adds one senior diplomat: \u201cThere is much more license in behaviour at table and in the amounts of alcohol consumed. Senior people don\u2019t like to talk about good manners, or attempt to teach them, for fear of being seen as elitist. The result has been that the culture has become more like that of an NGO than a diplomatic corps.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe culture of emails, texts and instant communication has done away with the carefully-honed, well-considered ambassadorial reflections sent back periodically to the Foreign Office,\u201d says an ex-diplomat who served as private secretary to several ministers. \u201cThis gives the whole culture a different flavour, more informal, more flip, less precise in its language.\u201d It has brought a coarsening of language and debate.<\/p>\n Even so, it has brought significant advantages, he believes. \u201cSpicing up brainstorms gets people to think more imaginatively,\u201d he says. \u00a0The aim is to tap into subconscious levels of thinking which is why brainstorm facilitators insist \u2013 despite the proposal that the Queen and the Pope might be persuaded to sing a duet together, or that the national anthem should be changed to God Save the World<\/em> \u2013 there is no such thing as a stupid suggestion.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you were considering options on Iran, for example, you might put at the most extreme end of the spectrum: dropping a nuclear bomb on Tehran. It wouldn\u2019t mean that you were recommending that. But you are setting the parameters for the discussion. At the other end of the scale would be doing nothing. You then explore how to move on the options in between to develop some serious policy,\u201d the former private secretary explains. \u201cBut it\u2019s important internally to be able to articulate everything. You have to be able to have conversations with ministers which it would be disastrous if they were made public. You have to be able to talk freely internally.\u201d<\/p>\n But would you send such explosive or offensive ideas to 35 people across five different Whitehall departments, as the Papal Visit Team did? \u201cThat\u2019s still internal,\u201d he replied. \u201cIf people leak that\u2019s a reflection of a decline of standards of a different kind.\u201d<\/p>\n Many lament the change in culture. \u201cWhen I joined the Foreign Office it was policy, policy, policy,\u201d a senior ambassador told an internal conference recently. \u201cToday it is all management, management, management.\u201d For all the emphasis on presentation (one senior official told me he sat around a table with 26 Whitehall heads of press, of strategic press, of public affairs and public advocacy last month) the language employed internally is slapdash and imprecise. \u201cIt\u2019s good enough to be shallow nowadays,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there is an important distinction between hastily shouted-out ideas which are recorded up on a whiteboard, and those which make it to the next stage of a creative process.\u201d Brainstorming can never take the place of good judgment.<\/p>\n Disquiet is emerging at the most senior levels. Last year the former Conservative Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd spoke about \u201ca malaise becoming increasingly apparent\u201d in his old department which he said had been \u201chollowed out\u201d and needed to \u201crepair and restore its tradition of excellence\u201d.<\/p>\n One of the key changes in the modernisation programme was a welcome new emphasis upon diversity with the aim of making the Foreign Office more representative of the rest of society in terms of class, gender, race and ethnicity. \u201cRace and diversity have become Holy Grails within in the civil service; they are the great shibboleths of political correctness,\u201d one senior official said.<\/p>\n The FCO has fine-tuned its antennae to avoid displaying racial prejudice or giving offence to Jewish and Muslim groups but those are conceived within a racial rather than a religious framework. Early on during the Commission for Africa one civil servant told me that I would be unable to use the word \u2018corruption\u2019 in the Commission\u2019s final report because it could look like anti-African racial stereotyping (the idea of not confronting the issue of corruption in Africa was advice I ignored). When several of the commissioners insisted that the report must begin by rooting itself in African culture there were nods of approval, until it was suggested that this would include religion in Africa. Several officials became distinctly uncomfortable at that \u2013 even though religion shapes many cultural attitudes which are impediments to economic and social development in Africa and religious institutions are key partners in delivering development on the ground.<\/p>\n There is a secularist mindset here which resists the idea that religion exerts serious influence in the public sphere. This artificial race\/religion divide explains why the Foreign Office happily lays on Muslim awareness courses for its staff but the equality and diversity training stop short when it comes to Britain\u2019s biggest minority, the Catholics who make up around 9 per cent of the UK population. Minorities are axiomatically to be respected until it comes to Christians whose culture it is deemed acceptable to disregard or disdain. \u201cThe Catholic church is regarded as a particular target,\u201d says one serving official, \u201cbecause its views on abortion, contraception and the use of condoms to combat Aids in Africa are seen as absurd in secular society\u201d.<\/p>\n When the department advertised internally for staff to form the Papal Visit Team it insisted that \u201chigh levels of tact and diplomacy will be required, and a good understanding of how government works\u201d but it added that \u201cprior knowledge of the Catholic church is not necessary\u201d.<\/p>\n That is why some senior figures inside the diplomatic corps are unsurprised at the debacle that followed. The Papal Visit Team were not just ignorant of much of the basics about the Catholic Church, they seemed to regard that as a badge of pride. \u201cI know nothing about Catholicism so start at the beginning,\u201d one member of the team said, introducing himself to a senior figure in the English church. \u201cWhere shall we start? Is there a book we can read?\u201d another civil servant asked a leading Catholic journalist. That is why they seemed unaware that many of their brainstorming ideas for the Pope\u2019s visit involved suggestions of things the Catholic Church was already doing.<\/p>\n But the ignorance of this group extended even to the processes of their own government. The brainstorming session occurred a month after a delegation from the Vatican had arrived in London and fixed the Pope\u2019s final UK itinerary with Dame Helen Ghosh, the senior Catholic civil servant who is chairing the lead Whitehall committee on the papal visit. The blue-sky thinkers did not include on the distribution list for their email Dame Helen, nor the British Ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, who had driven all the major initiatives on international disarmament, development, debt relief and climate change between No 10 and the Vatican.<\/p>\n \u201cThey may have got an A* for their process, with their brainstorms, their prioritising and their grids,\u201d said one senior Foreign Office insider tartly. \u201cBut they get a total fail on knowledge, political judgement and common sense.\u201d The fact that in their grid, they judged the overall impact of the minister responsible for organising the papal visit, the then Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, to be negative and non-influential is \u201cspectacularly inept, particularly in the run-up to a general election,\u201d the official continued, \u201ceven by the standards of the Foreign Office which has never been good at reading domestic British politics\u201d.<\/p>\n But concerns go deeper than the incompetence of one particular team. Questions are being raised about the supervisory structure and the wider culture within which these individuals operated. \u201cIt never occurred to any of them that what they had done was wrong,\u201d another distinguished diplomat told me. \u201cThey thought this document was a worthy basis for further discussion. That tells you a lot about the changed culture within the Foreign Office.\u201d<\/p>\n So too does initial reaction when senior staff found out about the memo. \u201cThey were disciplined as if the offence was minor,\u201d an insider disclosed, \u201cThe most senior person was merely \u2018moved to other duties\u2019 and the others were given a mild ticking-off. When the storm broke the senior people said: \u2018We can\u2019t revisit our disciplinary procedures just because there\u2019s been a hoo-haa\u2019. But in the end that is exactly what they had to do when it became clear that the Vatican were privately outraged that the beliefs of the Pope and millions of Catholics in Britain and across the world had been mocked.\u201d<\/p>\n The head of the team has now been suspended and sent home pending a disciplinary hearing that could lead to his dismissal or demotion. The rest of those involved have been removed from the team which has been reformed to include a number of practising Catholics. It will be led by George Edgar, who has been ambassador to both Macedonia and Cambodia.<\/p>\n Some in the church have detected the revival of anti-Catholic sentiment within the Foreign Office with resurrected rhetoric about the Pope as an enemy of political freedom which dates back to Elizabethan England. But that is a misreading. What is embedded in the King Charles St is a secularist worldview which displays a shallow understanding of religion and assumes a moral superiority of atheism over belief.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is part of a wider antipathy in the metropolitan elite to religion,\u201d says one former department head. \u201cWith Islam and Judaism they are not allowed to articulate it because of the pre-eminence of the equality, diversity and race agenda. But with Christianity it is regarded as an acceptable antagonism, which is partly fed by the increasingly militant Dawkinsite new atheism, and also by the general outrage over the paedophile priest scandal.\u201d<\/p>\n A significant number of diplomats are worried about this. \u201cIt is disturbing that religion is one of the most glaring areas of ignorance in the FCO,\u201d says one serving ambassador with experience in the Middle East. \u201cThe fact is that, throughout the world, religion is clearly increasingly important to how people see their own identity. My colleagues understand that about Islam post 9\/11 but not about anything else. Rather there is a myopia which says that just because something isn\u2019t important for me or British society it is not important at all. That\u2019s not what you expect from a diplomat whose job it is to understand people who are different from him.\u201d The Dharmic faiths \u2013 Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs \u2013 in the UK feel that government in general pays insufficient attention to them because they are focussed only on Islam and the Middle East.<\/p>\n The election has saved the department from another embarrassment. Baroness Kinnock, who was under Labour the Foreign Office minister of state responsible for relations with the Vatican is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and has for weeks been appearing under a banner proclaiming \u201cProtest the Pope – Say No to an official state visit to the UK!\u201d. She is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association which has called on Benedict XVI to resign as pope alleging he was personally involved in sex abuse cover-ups.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real victim of all this is the Foreign Office, its reputation in the world and its standing among other Whitehall departments,\u201d said one former ambassador. \u201cThey have lost a lot of credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Others draw systemic conclusions from this bizarre episode. \u201cThere\u2019s a canker at the heart of Foreign Office culture which needs rooting out,\u201d says one former head of department. \u201cThe people at the top of the diplomatic service, or the people just one level beneath them, need to ask what it is about the changes they have introduced that have allowed this kind of thing to flourish at the heart of the FCO. If we don\u2019t recover the seriousness and attention to detail that made the British diplomatic service probably genuinely the best in the world we\u2019re in big trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n To do that will require an internal inquiry into the cultural straitjacket from which all this grew. It will require a more radical level of self-scrutiny than the current shibboleths of diversity and equality seem to provide. It may be that Britain\u2019s senior diplomats are unable to do it themselves. William Hague should now do it for them.<\/p>\n \n