Here is a scary piece at the Telegraph bewailing the supposed decline in British diplomats’ foreign language skills. Which draws on some information extracted from the FCO by a Parliamentary Question. And quotes me:

Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland and a speaker of Serbian, Russian, Afrikaans and French has volunteered his services to the school.

“You are always going to be more efficient if you can speak the language,” he said. “Translators can get it wrong. People relax more when they are yammering away in their own language. You can go live on television if you are good enough, and present your policy to the general public.”

True enough, no doubt.

When journalist Matthew Holehouse talked to me about this subject, I pointed out to him that it was maybe not too surprising that relatively few diplomats have Extensive knowledge of the language of the country in which they’re serving. Extensive is pretty damn good – good enough to talk on live TV about compelx policy issues and not make a total fool of oneself. I made it to Extensive Serbian but it was not easy. Of course you can propel more diplomats to these higher levels if they stop being diplomats and start being language students, but that’s a very expensive use of people.

Instead the main FCO language level is Operational. This is still a high standard and enables you to conduct official business for most practical purposes without an interpreter, plus converse pretty normally and read the local media.

Which is why the figures in the report on Operational are strange. Are there really so few diplomats now at post with that standard?

Figures show that 48 of Britain’s 1,900 diplomats receive extra pay because they have an ‘extensive’ grip of a language, meaning they are close to communicating like a native.

Another 145 have an ‘operational’ grasp, meaning they can live a day-to-day life in the country but may struggle with technical or academic information.

Can it really be true – as the article says – that we have no Arabists in Egypt?! Drivel! Ambassador James Watt is a fluent Arab speaker:

Mr Watt joined the FCO in 1977 and began his diplomatic career in the Trade Relations and Exports Department. From 1978 to 1980 he undertook full-time language training in Arabic ahead of his first posting to Abu Dhabi as Second, later First, Secretary Political.

Sigh.

The FCO language Centre was indeed closed down under Labour. Was this bad? Probably. But it did not mean that language teaching stopped. In my own case I embarked on Serbia not via the FCO language Centre but rather with a hard-smoking sardonic Serb teacher called Zorica Radosavljevic in her small flat in Hammersmith. These days there are many new ways to learn a language via web-based training, so it may make sense not to have a heavy training infrastructure base in central London.

That said, it is important to bear in mind that the way government servives are costed bears heavily on how they line up for ‘cuts’. Thus the cost to the FCO of the FCO Language Centre as proclaimed by the Treasury was not merely the wages of the full-time and part-time staff and supporting books/IT and the Centre’s share of the electricity bill. It was also (probably) the Centre’s share of the huge ‘opportunity cost’ of not renting out that building for commercial purposes. This ‘accounting cost’ of course far exceeded the cash-flow cost of providing the service to FCO and other government departments’ officials. Quick – cut!

The real stupidity here lies in the fact that the Treasury under G Brown took to stratospheric levels such sophisticated bean-counting as a way of oppressing other government Departments, but had no way of measuring the value of longer-term things it could not immediately measure. Thus, for example, how to factor in to the books the increased likelihood of a Polish or Arabic or Mandarin speaker helping win a huge contract worth billions for UK plc thirty years later?

My own main beef with the FCO Language Centre was that it was full of language teachers:

… in my experience both at school and later at the late FCO Language Centre, a big part of the problem with language learning is language teachers. Most people who go into teaching language are obsessive on the detail and fine points. They tend to be poor if not hopeless at explaining the way the language works as a whole, and where intelligent guesses and smart short-cuts might be made.

This was brought home to me by a distinguished retired teacher near Stellenbosch who taught me Afrikaans when I was posted by the FCO to South Africa. His main love was Latin. He told me how he had taken a boy who hated Latin from next to nothing to almost degree standard with a year of private tuition. His method? To look at the whole of Latin grammar – great sheets of verb and case endings – for a first tough two weeks to get the gloomy boy to see the grammar in terms of simple patterns, then to plunge straight into Caesar and other interesting texts.

By contrast the typical British school treats learning a language as a trite linear process. Start with Nominative, then move to Accusative and Vocative. After a year or so of fatuous sentences no one would want to say, tackle Dative and Ablative. X-rated Subjunctive is for serious students only.

Even the former FCO Language Centre – yes, also abolished by Labour(!) – fell into this trap. Teachers of Russian were snootily dismissive of anyone who had learned another Slav language, refusing to see any overlap and congruity. Instead an institution like the FCO should be tackling "Slav", basing teaching squarely on the several thousand root words and general grammar construction common to most Slav languages. With that mastered, budding diplomats can easily switch to and between Russian, Polish or whatever.

I hope to meet soon the FCO team dealing with language training, and I’ll convey this thought in vigorous terms. But I am not sure what might be done about it.

Still, William Hague is patiently bringing some order back to the FCO: his emphasis on Skills is absolutely right. Just remember taxpayers: if you want some of our diplomats to learn Mandarin or Arabic, they’ll spend some two years off mainstream work doing so.