After leaving the FCO in a noisy cloud of sparks, my former colleague Craig Murray has made a name for himself as an activist promoting all sorts of Progressive Causes.

This BBC account from 2004 does a good job in summarising some of the professional issues the Murray saga threw up (so to speak).

I don’t recall having any significant dealings with Craig during my FCO career – we were on different FCO circuits.

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where ‘the West’ had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Anyway, it all then crashed as far as his career was concerned.

For anyone interested in this matter as an example of professional ethics and technique, Craig Murray’s website is noteworthy as it contains various official telegrams and other documents of the sort rarely seen by the public.

Craig asserts that they go to show the justice of his case. I am not so sure. 

See eg this telegram he sent about US foreign policy sent a few weeks after the US-led attack on Iraq began. Full of passion, even a good point or two. But as a piece of supposedly high-level FCO work it fell far short of the professional standard needed to make a serious policy impact. Not a considered, persuasive and useful contribution – more a Shrill Noise. (Note: Having made my own fair share of unpersuasive shrill noises down the years, I feel qualified to pronounce.)

Or this memo. Craig says in a conspiracy theory way that the names were blacked out for reasons of national security. Really? Some yes, others maybe. I suspect a proportion were excluded for normal personal data protection reasons (I too have asked for some documents with no security angle, only to have them returned with others’ names blacked out for this more or less laudable reason).

This note of a full and frank discussion of Craig’s encounter with FCO Personnel gives an unusually long account of a system grappling in a seemingly balanced and fair way with a morass of problems – personal and professional and policy – in the small Post which he had been leading. Craig says that he comes over well. Indeed. But so does the FCO.

Motto for aspiring diplomats. This is not just another job.

It is not enough to be Passionate, or even Right.

You must also be Convincing.