In the Times Dominic Lawson is unimpressed by the tone of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband in talking about Iran and China:

Our diplomatic war of words with Iran is brewing nicely. Last week the foreign secretary, David Miliband, condemned as “disturbing” the Ahmadinejad regime’s “lack of restraint” in its treatment of pro-democracy demonstrators. Tehran’s response was not long in coming: it retorted that “Britain will get slapped in the mouth if it does not stop its nonsense”.

Ooh, it’s handbags at dawn … or it would have been if Miliband had decided to fire back a further volley. I would have enjoyed something along the lines of: “Please consider our statement about your ‘lack of restraint’ as withdrawn. What Her Majesty’s foreign secretary meant to convey was that your murder, torture and punitive sodomising of dissidents is everything we have come to expect from a corrupt clique of depraved and power-crazed weirdos. We apologise if our earlier statement did not make this clear.”

He raises an important question of Diplomatic Technique. Under what circumstances is speaking bluntly or even rudely in public justified in diplomacy?

I recall my time in FCO Planning Staff as Geoffrey Howe’s official speech-writer. I served up a draft speech echoing the language of Ronald Reagan who famously had called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’.

Here he is in top flowing form:

Wild squawks and fluttering of wings in different parts of the FCO henhouse. This sort of language was quite … inappropriate. It would be seen in Moscow as … provocative.

My then boss the late David Gore-Booth argued back. What was the problem? The Soviet Union was evil, and it was an empire. Duh.

I now forget the outcome. No doubt some clever word-fudge.

Nowadays overt rudeness in diplomacy is on the rise, in some sense a deliberate plan by demagogues to besmirch the collective nest so that everyone in it becomes as dirty as they are. Hugo Chavez is a classic example, using a speech at the UN to call President Bush ‘the devil’. Zzzz.

Here is the King of Spain memorably telling Chavez to "shut up", then walking out when Nicaragua too starts to attack Spanish policy: 

The essence of British diplomatic style is to be the Anti-Rude. To use language which seeks to downplay confrontation and encourage reasoned debate.

Which has many advantages of course, not least since much international reasoned debate is in English and we have some sort of intellectual advantage in deploying our own language deftly.

Yet this unwavering politeness maybe also conveys some sort of subliminal paternalistic world-weariness: if only you emotional foreign Johnnies would just calm down and listen to the ever-wise Brits, we’d all be much better off, don’t you think?

And too much of that might be interpreted as a sign of underlying weakness?

That said, diplomatic relations are not symmetric. The Iranians can be as rude as they like to us, since they are pretty sure that a mob of world-weary Brits bribed by the FCO will not rampage into their Embassy in London and hold their diplomats hostage for a few months.

We, by contrast, can not be quite so sure about the commitment of the Iranians to protect our Embassy in Tehran or any UK business premises from a local invasion. So in a way we pull our rhetorical punches to keep the temperature down to a benign temperature – is a vividly drafted soundbite really worth all that hassle?

Not easy. But it is one thing being studiously diplomatic. Another to get across exactly the right message . Dominic Lawson again:

For the fascinating aspect of our reprimand to the Chinese ambassador was that we did not complain that a Briton had been treated in a way that no Briton should, instead that China had “failed in its basic human rights responsibilities”.

This has nothing to do with defending British interests, but everything to do with the notion that the objective of our foreign policy should be to advance the entire planet towards a state of grace and enlightenment roughly similar to that existing in Islington or Hampstead.

He goes on to give examples of Mrs Thatcher tenaciously fighting the Americans on various issues of principle, and points out how at the Chilcot Inquiry former Ambassador Sir C Meyer has contrasted her style with that of Tony Blair in a way not exactly favourable to his more recent leader.

Then there’s this:

When I asked Meyer last week why it was that the new Labour government had been so unwilling to press the British national interest in its negotiations with Bush, he replied that it thought the whole idea of the national interest was “passé”.

To put it most charitably, new Labour believed that in a “globalised” world, foreign policy could no longer be about anything other than “global” issues — and that Britain should be a leader in promulgating the appropriate “global” policies.

This is a profound point. Look at the front page of the FCO website. It headlines first and foremost the FCO’s social worker functions (Travel and Living Abroad: Travel advice & (sic) tips for British nationals overseas) and then Global Issues (Foreign policy explained & (sic) discussed). No link to any account of the UK and its national interests.

Plus what’s with the repeated silly-looking &? The English language has a little word called ‘and’.

This obsession with the G-word stems in part from New Labour instincts, but also from a fevered sense of defining the FCO in this non-British way so that it is uniquely ‘relevant’ in Whitehall terms in its claim on resources. Stupid, and a direct result of the way Gordon Brown built up a damaging Treasury tyranny of process on Tony Blair’s watch.

Finally, this paragraph in the Lawson piece caught my beady eye:

The most telling critique of this delusional foreign policy comes in regular instalments in the form of a blog by the former British ambassador to Poland, Charles Crawford. It’s called CharlesCrawford.biz and if you want to know just how much in despair many of our diplomats are, this is the place to look.

In a recent dispatch, Crawford lamented: “Who gives the impression of thinking that power exists, and is there to be deployed in the national interest? Or having any national interest at all?”

One would hope that the Conservative party is taking Crawford’s advice but there is not much sign of it.

Hmm…