More from a reader on Craig Murray and all that:

On the subject of Craig and the FCO, I haven’t read his book, or all the documents, but I understand some nasty and unsubstantiated allegations featured prominently. What’s your view on what they mean?

To me the whole saga suggests that regardless of one’s opinion of Craig’s views, or his chosen way of expressing them, The System hates few things more than someone making a song and dance.

I too have not read his book, but I have looked at the various documents he has published on his site, a tiny fraction of the paperwork involved I suspect and of course put there by Craig himself.

I think simply that it is not in fact about ‘the System hating someone making a song and dance’.

As an Ambassador at one of our overseas missions you have professional responsibilities and some important privileges.

Your responsibilities include:

  • sending FCO/Whitehall honest, intelligent and accurate analysis and recommendations about what is going on in ‘your’ host country (and to a degree the region), plus about the likely local impact of British/EU/Western policies
  • keeping a good network of contacts throughout local society to help you be intelligent and accurate
  • doing your best to maintain some sort of productive relationship with the host government – they run the place, whether the Brits like it or not
  • and leading a properly managed mission where public money is spent wisely to help you do all the above.

In return for all that you have a unique chance to use your personal skill and energy steadily to build your authority back in FCO/No 10/Whitehall so that your views and ideas have Weight. You can make specific recommendations on policy which, depending on effective you are in gauging how best way to make an impact back home, are likely to be seriously considered at the highest levels of government.

So, to repeat. It is not enough to be Right and Persistent. You must be Convincing.

And to be convincing there maybe comes a point when instead of banging off another strident telegram copied hither and thither, you drop a private hand-written letter to the Foreign Minister or Permanent Under-Secretary, calmly expressing your anxieties about the way things are going and suggesting that it would be wise to change course, or at least look hard at doing so.

And if, after all that, your best advice is considered carefully by the people paid by Parliament to look at such matters and is nonetheless rejected, your professional responsibility is to shut up and get on with implementing the agreed policy. The battle will have to be fought another day.

This is the basic point. In a democracy a senior official has the right to be heard. And the responsibility to accept the outcome.

I don’t know the exact sequence of events in Craig Murray’s case. But it all went badly off the rails.

Did it do so because there was a vast establishment conspiracy to ‘silence dissent’?

I think not.

‘The System’ in fact does not exist. What does exist are a fairly small number of serious people working quite hard to make sense of myriad complexities and awkward choices.

You might suspect that such people end up getting a bit wound up and self-absorbed among themselves. Risk-averse. Inclined to ‘not rock the boat’. And you might be right in various cases.

But they are at least experienced and thoughtful, and not prone to dart hither and thither in policy terms.

In the end it boils down to Ministers getting up in Parliament or on TV and defending their policies. They have found down the decades that people who make a Song and Dance are not necessarily the most reliable source of reliable advice.

Energy, passion, innovation are all welcome in the right proportions. They need to be attached to Planet Earth.