Update: this DT Blogs piece makes it to The Browser

My latest piece over at Telegraph Blogs looks at how state A sends a message to state B. Not as easy a task as you might think:

Diplomats have mulled over these questions for a good 800 years and more. In the early Middle Ages special grand seals were made to stop documents being forged or improperly opened. A treaty could be cast as a ‘chirograph’, a document containing two identical texts with CYROGRAPHVM written across both of them. When the document was cut in half through these letters – giving one text for each different party – only those two original texts would match, thus guarding against forgery and manipulation.

One top-level way to send a message is indeed to use the form of a letter. This a document signed by someone (say a Prime Minister) addressed to someone else by name (eg a Prime Minister or Head of State) in another country. All the Embassy has to do is hand over a copy of the letter (usually an advance copy – the signed text arrives a couple of weeks later, invariably looking scruffy after the vagaries of the UK diplomatic bag) to the office of the recipient, perhaps adding some further private verbal top-spin as appropriate.

But that is not fool-proof. Once you have handed over the letter you don’t know if the flunkies in the recipient’s office will indeed pass it on to the intended lofty recipient. They may pass it on under a very disobliging commentary of their own, skewing the recipient’s interpretation. They might even have some very wily reasons for not passing it on, and proceed to share those reasons openly with you.

Read the whole thing. It has the severe disadvantage of being (in my own immodest opinion) sensible and somewhat informative, features lost on most of the people commenting so far.

Update   I have had a message from African-Italian journalist Matteo FK in Mali who warmly commends the thought I gave at the end of that article and (of course familiar to readers here): It’s not what you say – it’s what they hear.

Matteo writes: I simply wanted to thank you for your article about diplomacy and the Assange affair. I’m an African-Italian freelance journalist and I often follow diplomatic issues in the region. The lesson you post at the end of your piece is simply a great truth, important even in the daily life of civilians, not just diplomats. People underestimate that importance. Thanks again.