In case you have not yet had enough about FCO foreign language policy, here’s my first full piece for the Daily Telegraph (ie newspaper + website) on the subject, distinguished on many levels but above all for craftily slipping some words of Serbian into the piece to show how clever I am haha:

As he tours Asia this week, David Cameron will want to hear our embassies using tip-top language skills to help senior British businessmen attack local markets. He should be happy enough: many ambassadors and high commissioners today do speak local languages, thanks to investment in their language skills, years if not decades ago. The embassy in Tokyo is well stocked with Japanese speakers, not least Ambassador Sir David Warren, who is on his third tour of duty there. In Indonesia, Ambassador Mark Canning knows the language. In Malaysia, learning Malay is less of a priority: English is widely spoken across the country.

British diplomats are given extra allowances for each “hard” foreign language they learn, the money varying according to the difficulty of the language and the level of expertise reached. In happier times, these allowances were paid for a few years after a diplomat had left the country concerned.

Imagine the consternation of Foreign Office bean-counters when these incentives actually worked! Some people learnt lots of languages, handily boosting their salaries. So language allowances were scaled back. The abolition by Labour of the FCO Language Centre was the culmination of years of downgrading diplomatic language skills, mainly by trimming such financial incentives.

Meanwhile, other cost-cutting plans unfold. Junior British diplomatic staff are being replaced overseas by skilled local talent, especially in our European embassies, whose façades look imposing but which in UK-based staffing terms are being hollowed out. Many overseas jobs, where young diplomats learn a language that will serve them well later at senior levels, no longer exist.

Can the current language talent pool deliver a high standard in the years and decades to come? It’s not easy even to measure the problem: after all the spending on government IT, Foreign Office databases still can’t run-off lists of diplomat language speakers and where they are…

My own favourite example of linguistic mischief came in Sarajevo in late 1996. High Representative Carl Bildt and assorted ambassadors, including myself, were asking the Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic to accept an annoying Bosnian Serb proposal that meetings of the state presidency alternate between the two entities. Izetbegovic lost his temper and said in Bosnian, “OK, OK, we can rotate meetings every first, second or fifth time!” (“Svaki prvi, drugi, peti put!”) To protect him, Izetbegovic’s interpreter dishonestly translated his outburst as his earlier line opposing any rotation.

When we returned to base, there was gloom at our failure to make progress until I (the only one of us who spoke Bosnian) told the group that Izetbegovic had made an important concession. The rotating meetings took place.

That last point is especially telling. Someone should do a Harvard Business School case-study on the FCO’s IT policies. What has been happening after so much money has been spent on IT down the years through Firecrest and all to stop a fairly small organisation like the FCO having a database of the core skills (and whereabouts) of its own employees?

Thus if a crisis erupts in (say) Libya, as I understand it the FCO can’t press a button and find (a) all Arabic speakers (b) who have served in or near Libya and (c) who might be easily deployable to help.

Come on, guys. This is basic.

I feel an urge coming on to dig out my famous 1999 paper on A Tale of Two Dinosaurs…