All Change

Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office’s posting policy. I think.

Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all their postings, and made a chart to show where there real expertise lay. The fascinating findings were something like this:

• there are nearly 200 countries in the world, depending on how one defines various micro-states, the Vatican and so on
• my top FCO colleagues as of 2002 had been posted to only 41 of them
• together they had had some 180 postings in their various distinguished careers
• but 112 or so of those postings had been to only five places: Paris, Washington, Bonn/Berlin, Brussels, Tokyo
• so their careers had been heavily skewed away from breadth of global and operational hands-on diplomatic experience
• and if one looked at the world’s (then) troubled hot spots as described in the newspapers, almost no single senior FCO officer had had any personal experience of them at all

I wrote all this up in a terse memo, pointing out that this was not too surprising in some ways – for much of our careers there had been notably fewer countries anyway (no broken-up Soviet Union or Yugoslavia).

Plus the analysis showed that there were in fact two sorts of diplomats.

Senior folk who very skilfully haggled over and negotiated the rules of global order based comfortably, plumply and safely in Big Capitals, the UN/EU/NATO etc.

And the more junior less well rewarded poor sods (like eg me) who had to go out on the street to try to implement these rules in dangerous tricky uncomfortable places such as Bosnia, Africa, parts of Latin America, the Middle East and so on.

This had several effects, one of which was that the people actually on the ground in Hot Spots often had no real clout/authority/profile back home at a high level. Exactly the wrong way to have things set up for maximising our chances of achieving operational objectives in places where things were most difficult and where large sums of public money were being spent. 

Maybe it made sense to take a hard look at this to ensure that no-one reached the top of the FCO without having experienced recently a lot more of the dirty work to see how things actually happened? No point in having people grandly pronouncing on policies far away from the problem and devising schemes which in the messy violent reality simply might not work or even might make things worse?

I fed in this piece of paper quietly to the very top of the FCO. And, by magic or by coincidence (probably the latter), things started to change. We now have an FCO Top Gun Sherard Cowper-Coles heading a very tough Embassy in Kabul, sent there after being HM Ambassador in Saudi Arabia – that would never have happened when I was growing up.

Always a good question when a politician or senior diplomat starts talking eloquently about another country: "how much time have you yourself spent there?"