A reader writes about FCO blogs:

FCO bloggers try to keep to policy areas they have responsiblity for.  Diverging from this has caused the odd frantic call from London to the offending blogger.

There is nothing to say that staff cannot advance national interest behind closed doors AND engage in a public policy debate through blogs.  Blogs offer you the chance of writing an op-ed a day.  We should take that chance.

Hmm.

I think not.

Blogs offer you the chance to write an op-ed a day. So do newspapers. Yet how many op-ed pieces by serving British diplomats have there ever been? None?

The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can’t work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both.

Just say a diplomat posted a blog entry politely speculating on the wisdom of current Climate Change or Middle East policy. Imagine the scenes in Parliament:

"The Secretary of State apparently can not persuade even his own senior officials of the wisdom of this policy! Why should we take any notice of him?"

Which is why the FCO blogs are a friendly but bland product, making no serious contribution to the ‘global foreign policy debate’.

One of the better FCO blogs by Stephen Hale tries to explain where FCO blogging fits in to the UK’s foreign policy priorities:

More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it’s within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic).

But how precisely do you begin to define what a ‘target audience’ is for any given diplomatic blog then target it without being at least a bit sharp and different? It takes months if not years to build up a non-trivial readership – blandness is not the way to do it.

Let’s see what FCO bloggers have to say about this story:

David Miliband is criticised by a high-powered Commons committee today over claims that he "washed his hands" of alleged sexual abuse of Iraqi women at the British embassy in Baghdad.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee demands to know why the Foreign Secretary had left an investigation into the claims to the same US firm that employed those accused of harassment.

An interesting set of practical management issues buzzing around in this one:

  • how Embassies operate in tough environments
  • legal status of contractors vis-a-vis the Embassy
  • role of DFID vis-a-vis FCO
  • how best to deal with alleged misconduct
  • and so on

What will we get from the FCO blog empire on all this? My guess: a big round nothing.

NB not because the system is evil or incompetent or evasive.

Rather because there are other much better ways of dealing with serious questions than via the ephemeral and (said by one who should know) self-indulgent world of blogging?

Update: I have tried to post a comment on Stephen Hale’s FCO blogsite expanding a little on the points above. Let’s see if the comment appears after this scary message in Big Red Letters:

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