My latest droll article for DIPLOMAT magazine on the strange twilight world of Diplomatic Expulsions is available here:

You know the story. Only too well. Your spouse yells at you for what you have done. Or for what you have not done. Or for what you have come to represent in the tumultuous relationship. Frustrated and cross, you yell at your children. And in their frustration and crossness, your children kick the cat.

So it is with foreign ministries. Taking heat from public opinion and the prime minister/president on an awkward foreign policy problem? Frustrated and/or cross? No local cat available? Find a foreign one! Kick (out) a diplomat!

From the start, diplomats and their pseudo-detached patronising privileged ways have made a plumply tempting target for local anger and indignation. Take Aesop, a mere 2,500 years ago. He was sent to Delphi as the ambassador of King Croesus. But things went wrong.

One version has it that in an innovative gesture of bilateral munificence – these days called ‘international development assistance’ – he dispensed gold coins to the local population. So struck was he by the recipients’ ingratitude that he decided to dispense no more – a noble, principled stance, alas not adopted by today’s international developmentalists.

Another version has it that he was cheating on his expenses.

One way or another, the citizens of Delphi reacted with no little zeal to his impiety and hurled him over a cliff – the first example of an ambassador departing a posting by air after being expelled? But it turned out alright in the end, as they then suffered years of plague and pestilence and were advised by the Oracle to build a pyramid in Aesop’s honour…

And so on to contemporary examples, including a couple of good ones from my own career (as previously described here and here).

The fate of expellees:

The expelled diplomat acquires some fleeting fame and expects to be welcomed home as a hero. The reality is different.

Back at HQ, expelled diplomats merely cause a lot more work for cynical HR and press departments, who think they have enough work already. Plus, whereas other diplomatic colleagues are politely sympathetic, there is always a curious suspicion that whatever they have heard from the media and through the internal grapevine, the ‘full story’ will never be known.

Maybe there was just a hint of, horror, personal misjudgement somewhere along the line?

For whatever reason, the expellee has failed to complete a mission, and got in a personal tangle. People do not like to be associated with that: just a tad too much bad luck for comfort.

The cool Nick Lowe song I’m a Mess comes to mind:

The smart set I used to run around with are invisible now. They all cut me loose when one said that what I’ve got might just rub off on them somehow…

But beware. The DIPLOMAT website keeps the latest articles up for only a short time.

So read quickly.