The first meeting of the Foreign Secretary’s new Locarno Group ("senior FCO alumni, selected for their breadth of experience and expertise") took place today. The aim, part of an energetic and even impressive series of moves led by William Hague to transform the FCO’s performance at many new levels, is not unambitious:

The Group’s work will contribute to the Foreign Secretary’s wider efforts to strengthen the long term capability and international effectiveness of the FCO as an institution at the heart of government, and improve our country’s capacity to pursue effective foreign policy for the years and decades to come.

Here is the list of participants and background material (and a taste of their most senior former posts, as added by me):

  • Sir Michael Arthur           (India, Berlin)
  • Sir Daniel Bethlehem      (Legal Adviser)
  • Charles Crawford            (me)
  • Sir William Ehrman         (China)
  • Dame Glynne Evans       (Chile, Portugal)
  • Anne Grant                    (S Africa)
  • Sir Jeremy Greenstock    (UN New York)
  • Sir John Holmes             (No 10, Paris)
  • Matthew Kirk                  (Helsinki)
  • Kate Smith                     (Tehran)
  • Sir Stephen Wall             (No 10, EU Brussels)

All of us are now doing different things of varying levels of power, influence, seniority and amusement. We are serving in this advisory role on an unpaid pro bono basis.

We have agreed that the proceedings of this Group are to be confidential. It remains to be seen how it develops – enough food for thought to get unmanageable intellectual indigestion.

Suffice to say that the exchanges were damn interesting. And that the fact of the exhaust-pipe falling off my car this morning as I drove along was not that ill an omen.

Clunk.