What's wrong with the Foreign Office

DIPLOMACY JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE

The surprise announcement of the new British ambassadors in Washington, Paris and Bonn has undoubtedly come as a bitter pill to some of those passed over—as Sir Con O'Neill's resignation, among other things, makes clear. But the popular interpretation that Mr Brown's trio of appointments marks a deliberate rebuff to the Foreign Office 'establishment' is very wide of the mark. The Paris embassy has fre- quently in the past enjoyed a political incum- bent, and Mr Christopher Soames, although suffering from the handicap of being a noted anti-Gaullist, speaks excellent French as well as having Sir Winston Churchill's daughter as his wife. Again, Washington, too, was 'political' (with the then Mr David Ormsby Gore) in the days of Mr Macmillan, and it is therefore scarcely surprising that another ex-politician should be appointed by Mr Macmillan's most devoted disciple, Mr Harold Wilson. And at Bonn the conventional Foreign Office profes- sional, Sir Roger Jackling, has been preferred to the unconventional Sir Con. It is, alas, difficult to conclude from all this that the 'Government has lost any confidence whatever in the professional staff of Her Majesty's Foreign Office.

Nevertheless, many members of the Labour party, and other old-fashioned radicals, cling tenaciously to the belief that the Foreign Office is staffed exclusively with elegant young men from Eton and Winchester, Oxford and Cam- bridge who spend their days in covering up for colleagues engaged in espionage and their evenings at cocktail parties, and who exert a sinister and reactionary influence on Labour Foreign Ministers, turning honest down-to- earth trade union leaders into helpless puppets Of 'the establishment' overnight. Now, as it happens, I believe that the influence of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office over the past fifteen years has been almost wholly malign : but that the blame for this lies not in the narrow social stratum from which it is recruited, but in the very success of the critics in invalidating the grounds for their criticism. A high proportion of entrants into the Foreign Office does still, for reasons which do not concern us here, come from Oxford or Cambridge. But the average member of the Foreign Service today received his early educa- tion at a grammar school or even a secondary modern. He is just as likely to vote Labour as he is to vote Conservative. He is excep- tionally conscientious and hard working, and academically he is far more highly qualified than his predecessors were thirty years ago, or than his colleagues in other government depart- ments outside the Treasury: he may well be a Fellow of All Souls. When he is en poste abroad he has, it is true, to attend a great many official cocktail parties—and mighty dreary he finds them. When he is stationed in London, his life is far removed from the glamorous country house weekend style of existence which popular imagination attributes to him. He probably struggles hard to make ends meet in a modest house in the suburbs to which he commutes in the evenings long after his critics have been reunited with their families.

He suffers, in fact, from one special defect: his language training makes him totally un- suited to operate the foreign policy of a country which sees itself once more as essentially a part of the Continent of Europe. Right up until the last war a candidate for the Foreign Service had first to take himself off to France and Germany to make himself thoroughly proficient in French and German at his own expense. As a result he was fully equipped to maintain the closest possible contact with other foreign diplomats abroad, who were similarly endowed. He was often accused of being 'cosmopolitan' in his outlook—and the accusation was justified.

During and after the war the egalitarians decided that the language requirements re- stricted undesirably the field of recruitment. So the requirements were abandoned. Since many. But even those who have attended these then the Foreign Of has admittedly main- tained 'refresher courses' in France and Ger- courses would hardly have qualified for the approval of Harold Nicolson's Jeanne de Hainault; and the two major continental languages enjoy in the Foreign Service neither the kudos nor the financial advantages apper- taining to knowledge of the `rare languages' such as Persian or Chinese. The consequence is often painfully obvious in -British embassies abroad. When I was working in Paris in the late 1950s I recall British commercial coun- sellors who could not even cope with lunch- time small talk in French.

The `Anglicisation' of the Foreign Service has coincided with another new postwar development which has, in turn, encouraged it : the appearance of the mammoth American missions which are such striking landmarks in every newly emergent capital city, and in many old ones as well. American diplomats are, of course, even less .capable of coping with the old continental languages (with the possible exception of Spanish) than are the British. Moreover coming, as many of them do, from an eastern seaboard, Ivy League background, they are often peculiarly susceptible to that form of snobbery which consists in aping English ways and manners. Given also that their missions overseas are richly endowed with the latest amenities and with alluring Px stores, it is hardly surprising that in post after post overseas the British and American em- bassies should exert a mutual and exclusive attraction on each other, or that the smaller service should have fallen more and more under the influence of the larger.

For the first decade after the war the per- vasiveness of the American influence over the British Foreign Service may well have been to our advantage. The wartime alliance continued to serve the real interests of both countries, and the ability of British governments (which was indisputable at that time) to influence American decisions, in large part through the intimate personal relationship between the two diplomatic services, was arguably the richest jewel in the shrinking imperial crown. But jewel in the shrinking imperial crown.

Suez, at any rate, marked the watershed (and, of course, the charge which the Foreign Office levelled at Eden was •not that he had attacked Egypt or engaged in collusion with France and Israel, let alone that the whole expedition ended in fiasco—but that he had affronted the Americans). Many continentals at that time assumed that Britain had learnt her lesson and would turn to Europe; and a few British politicians—Peter Thorneycroft conspicuous amongst them—drew the same conclusion.

They were swiftly disillusioned. Within weeks Harold Macmillan was on his way to Bermuda to meet President Eisenhower, and the 'special relationship' was hastily rebuilt. As it became plain that British exports might suffer severely from the emergence of the Common Market, the Board of Trade was allowed to pursue a trading arrangement called a free trade area, but it was made painfully clear that there must be no unseemly political overtones. There was a brief interlude in which the Foreign Office tried to destroy this embarrassing diversion which the countries of continental western Europe had thrown across- the path of the Anglo-American alliance. Then came the moment of truth. In the spring of 1961 the newly elected President Kennedy passed through London and declined the opportunity to sort out the world's problems with Mr Macmillan.

Overnight the Foreign Office became 'con- verted to Europe.' Suddenly one was led to understand that previous hesitations were due

to the insularity, or the hankerings after empire, of our politicians : the Foreign Office, it tran- spired had always believed in Europe—a Europe, that is, which understood its proper place in the Anglo-American alliance. Unfortunately the Europe of the Foreign Office's imagining was diametrically opposed to the Europe that the man who had now assumed the dominant role in the destinies of the Con- tinent wished to construct. The Foreign Office looked to Europe to enable Britain to re-estab- lish her essential importance in the eyes of the American administration: de Gaulle conceived of united Europe as the means of asserting the Continent's independence of the United States.

Two inevitable consequences followed: the attempts by the Conservative government in 1961 and by the Labour government in 1967 to enter the European Community were doomed from the start; and the Foreign Office became committed to a noble crusade against the Presi- dent of France.

The crusade rapidly assumed the proportions of an obsession. Throughout the past decade the British Embassy in Paris has been little more than a sorting office for anti-Gaullist gossip. Inordinate importance has been attached to the prospects and opinions of any European politician who happened to be outspokenly critical of the General. When I recently visited Bonn I was saddened, but not surprised, to be told by Germans that the hero of the British Embassy in Bonn was in fact a well-known SPD politician whose claim on its affections was that his hostility to de Gaulle waxed as his own real influence and significance declined.

Weird and wonderful visions of the deter- mination of continental governments to resist de Gaulle on our behalf were constructed for the benefit of the politicians at home. The 'friendly Five,' invented on the morrow of the first Paris veto in 1963, live on in the dreams of our diplomats today. One distinguished senior member of the Foreign Service who takes his relaxation on the grouse moors tells his friends that if he says 'de Gaulle' to himself as a grouse appears in range of his butt it vastly improves his killing power.

The point to notice about this anti-Gaullist crusade is that it is a response not so much to the General's success in blocking our way into Europe as to his own determination to humble the United States. There are certainly other elements in it: painfully aware that this coun- try has lacked a coherent foreign policy for over a decade, there is a human feeling of envy among our diplomats for a neighbouring coun- try of comparable size which has found one.

But the overriding motive of this Franco- phobia of the Foreign Service is neither resentment at past humiliations nor envy: it is fear. The fear that the General may eventu- ally succeed in diminishing the global im- portance of the United States, and in showing that the giant has feet of clay. Now if that happened it would be very much more difficult to satisfy Parliament or public opinion that the cloying and exclusive intimacies between Foreign Office and Foggy Bottom served a national purpose. Our diplomats might even be expected to know French and German once more.

I suppose it may be argued that our foreign policy is dictated by our politicians, and not by the diplomats In truth of course the strategy of our great departments of state—with rare ex- ceptions—is constructed by the civil servants. The last Foreign Secretary to operate his own foreign policy was Anthony Eden, who brought unique experience to the job, and was cordially disliked by his officials in consequence. Since then successive Foreign Secretaries have been dominated by their civil servants and their Prime Ministers (who have in turn been dominated by Foreign Office thinking). Probably the present incumbent, who likes to demonstrate his in- dependence by interpolating into his briefs per- sonal comments which are insulting either to his officials, or to his audience, or to both, represents the politician face to face with the bureaucratic machine at his most pathetic.

I sometimes think we should make a virtue of necessity, and offer to make a loan of the Foreign Service to General de Gaulle, for pay- ment in gold, of course. A country as heavily

in hock as ours cannot have a foreign policy anyway, so we should hardly miss our diplo- mats. The top flight of the French diplomatic service is probably unrivalled; but the rest leaves plenty to be desired, and here our Foreign Service could be usefully employed. They could hardly fail to acquire from their French col- leagues both the knowledge of continental lan- guages they lack and the healthy scepticism about the wisdom of the State Department they need. When, in three or four years' time, we got them back again, we should be several hundred million dollars to the good, and we should have a Foreign Service which was properly cosmopo- litanised once more. Meanwhile George Brown might find he could really enjoy himself at last.