I did not get it quite right in ascribing responsibility for the FCO/Pope fiasco to young officer Steven Mulvain.
It looks instead as if a more senior colleague, one Anjoum Noorani, is the Guilty Man. Here is the Telegraph account:
Mr Noorani, who, like Mr Mulvain, is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, chaired the “brainstorm” session which led to the “Ideal Visit” memo, which also proposed that the Pope should sing a duet with the Queen and sponsor a network of Aids clinics.
He worked as press secretary at the British Embassy in
We remain left with one rather significant issue. Was the infamous memo intended to be a joke/spoof?
Or, horror, did they mean it?
Let me explain the background.
Back in older pre-Labour times the FCO was organised in a rather mechanical way, by Departments.
These were Geographical, covering specific clusters of countries (usually with some lofty haggling on the margins over the arbitrariness of whether country X ‘really’ fitted better in another Department).
And Functional, dealing with policy themes of a more general nature: see eg Energy, Space and Science Department, or my old hunting ground Maritime, Aviation and Environment Department.
Plus various HR and support Departments too.
And all that worked well.
Why? Because diplomatic work was grounded solidly in the fact that countries (a) exist and (b) are important.
So if a Head of State were coming to the
And that Department would have Authority round
There was, in a word, structure. And, in another word, continuity.
This allowed a bloc of country/regional expertise to develop and be sustained. Members of Departments came and went, but there would always be someone around who remembered or knew what had happened years back.
Then along came Gordon Brown at the Treasury and a proliferation of targets, road maps, objectives and all the rest for all of
This forced to the fore a problem.
If the FCO’s main policy themes were now ‘global’ and not fitting into neat categories – environment/energy, terrorism, Islam – (and they had to be if HM Treasury were to pay for them), how to measure the resources devoted to them with all this fuddy-duddy structure?
So an appalling idea was cooked up.
To turn the whole thing round, to move away from ‘geographical’ departments to a completely new organisational arrangement (I dare not say structure because there was no structure) based on the FCO’s Strategic Priorities.
Remember the beef?
Of course, annoyingly, countries and their footling problems and visitors would not go away. But they would be dealt with by ‘Units’. Or something.
This at a stroke devalued if not destroyed the
The FCO’s accumulated wisdom was scattered. Control and continuity were lost in a maze of organisational uncertainty and incessant physical relocations, as different Units and Sections moved listlessly round the main building trying to find a sensible place to be parked.
So what do we see now? Instead of a group of diplomats building up an expertise about a country and (yes) maybe some sympathy with its problems, we have ad hoc arrangements set up to deal with ad hoc realities. No-one knows anything:
One source said: “The most striking thing about the Foreign Office team has been how ineffectual they are. They have been disengaged and, frankly, clueless.
“I have never had the impression that any members of the team were informed or even sensitive to the Catholic Church or Catholicism generally.”
One senior source at the Catholic Church in
“All of our dealings with this Foreign Office team have suggested they don’t have any understanding of Catholicism and that’s how this issue seems to have come about.
Today’s FCO:
The Pope’s coming on a State Visit? Huh? Why?
Sigh. OK, we’ll set up a Papal Visit Unit. Who’s around? Noorani and Malvain will do. Neither of them know anything about the
Here’s what I was sent yesterday from a former colleague who joined the FCO from another Whitehall Department because it set high standards but who left recently:
… a major reason being the total change in culture (for the worse) within the FCO in the period of the current government.
Your comment yesterday regarding the FCO’s absolute obsessions about AGW and outreach to Islam was right on the money. This should be coupled with another obsession with management-speak gobbledeygook, which results in the publication of a wide range of incomprehensible politically-correct crap, particularly in things like the FCO website (internal and external) and "News & Views". It was galling for me to see the outright propaganda and meaningless backslapping perpetrated in those areas.
Unfortunately, this was the sort of Orwellian atmosphere that permeated the place, in my view. The FCO has more people working on "Change" and "Diversity" issues than they have working on the MEPP. A disgrace and utter madness, yet typical of the FCO’s currently warped world view.
We might be crap at diplomacy but, hey, we’re really diverse and that’s what matters. doesn’t it?
… I went to see Christopher Meyer give a talk in the Locarno Room. I subscribe to most of his views and, for me, the talk was a delight, although paradoxically, it was quite depressing too! We all like to have our prejudices confirmed.
Anyway, there was one particular exchange that has stuck with me. One of the questioners was from HR. He went on, very defensively, about some of the points Sir Chris made ("I used to have something called a Desk Officer…"). The questioner from HR said, "Our service delivery operations are very successful, blah, blah,,,,"
Sir Chris responded very deliberately, " ‘Service…..Delivery…..Operations…. Does that mean "doing my job"?
Classic! Encapsulated such a lot for me but it was lost on some of the brainwashed PC clones in the audience. Their lack of personal and institutional self-awareness was very, very scary.
I’m not sure that, whoever gets in, the situation is recoverable and that makes me so sad…
People used to say to me, "Oh, it’s alright for you. You don’t care. You’re leaving." Nothing could be further from the truth. I was leaving BECAUSE I cared so much. I’m sure you can identify with that.
Is it recoverable?
Only if the next government brings in people who understand the problem AND formally roots out the stupid Brownian obsession with Targets:
… the very idea of ‘targets’ is philosphically incoherent.
This flows from the fact that governments (and the public) have no way of deciding how to manage risk, in the sense of reasonably calculating the likelihood of policies (a) being properly implemented and (b) producing the good results we expect over (c) a realistic timescale, while (d) keeping an eye on the opportunity cost of not doing something else.
Thus no-one can tell us which is better:
- short-term likely-to-work quick wins
- medium-term, maybe-less-likely-to-work significant wins
- longer-term, medium risk, potentially huge wins
Government thrashing around in this conceptual morass is now horrible to behold. Not surprisingly the public get fed up and confused. Populist noises and a Sense of Looming Unease grow in parallel.
Basically, if government is faced with the sheer complexity of modern life and so with all the best intentions can not work out what is Cause and what is Effect in policy-making, maybe the best thing to do is … a lot less, but try to get it right?
That’s the point.
It’s all about a philosophical approach to knowledge and process.
If you get that wrong, as Gordon Brown has done on a truly ruinous scale, everything else HAS to be wrong. And go wrong.
Not an epistemological mistake the Catholic Church is likely to make.
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