I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can’t say once they leave the FCO. See eg here.

Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules:

The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public comment – written, broadcast, in press articles, books, school debates – reflecting their career experience. This is not about official secrets. It is an attempt to convert a career-long professional duty of personal discretion into submission to censorship until death…

The worrying thing is not only regulation 5 but its vague scope and application. My part-time job was withdrawn hours after I commented on Radio 4’s Today programme and in the Guardian about the government’s suppression of the SFO’s inquiries into BAE’s dealings in Saudi Arabia damaging the credibility of its policies on good governance and corruption. This action reinforced my point.

… The FCO must rethink regulation 5 again, this time with more respect for freedom and for informed discussion of foreign policy. It should also publish its regulations: officials have a right to know which of the limitations on their liberty that they accept on joining the FCO will endure when they leave; citizens should also know by what decrees they are denied access to the views of former public servants.

Of course officials already do have the right to know these ‘limitations on their liberty’. And is there really an issue about such Rules being published for the edification of the public?

Strive as I do to be indignant about all this, I fail.

Here I am, more recently retired than Edward Clay, blogging and writing away, often in a way highly critical of HMG positions. Yet I clear nothing with the FCO in advance, nor have they made any attempt to shut me up.

So in practice the impact of the Rules is not necessarily ‘draconian’, although I am not revealing/analysing operational decisions by Ministers on a highly controversial topic such as the decision to invade Iraq.

This is where Sir J Greenstock’s book on Iraq has been left in the fridge. See his own characteristically gracious and sensible views in this lively exchange.

And whereas I suspect almost every serious serving diplomat accepts reasonable limitations on how far sensitive information gleaned during a career is published afterwards (and when), any such limitations are bound to be ‘vague’ to some degree.

The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

  • weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants’ memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
  • a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society.