David Miliband’s protocol problems in India (the risk or otherwise of annoying senior Indian interlocutors by being too ‘familiar’) raise an interesting operational point.

What is the role of the in-country Ambassador in such circumstances? In particular, how far should he/she go to brief the visiting Minister on how to behave?

Not so easy to answer.

The case for spelling out directly to the visiting Minister some no-brainer protocol pitfalls is that this should help avoid the sort of mess we saw in India this time round, plus it prevents the Minister blaming the Ambassador afterwards if there is a mess ("Why the hell did you not warn me about this sort of thing?").

The case against is that it is not easy to know quite how far to take this sort of thing without giving said Minister the impression that the Ambassador thinks he is a naive or insensitive or crassly rude person. Are eg table manners included? ("Please don’t patronise me, Ambassador. I may not have had all your evidently wide-ranging social advantages, but I do know how to behave.")

My approach in protocol-conscious Poland when visitors were to encounter one or other or both Kaczynski twins?

Send the Private Secretary a punchy personal confidential email before the party got on the plane to fly to Warsaw, giving a frank but short description of the senior people the Minister is to meet and spelling out how each encounter should be handled from a protocol/manners/human relations point of view. Mention one or two specific things to do, or to be careful not to do. Then on the plane over a drink the PS can pass this text under the boss’s nose and they can mull it all over as far as they think necessary, picking up any points of clarification on arrival.

This generally works quite well.

As long as the vividly cast email and the rest of the high-level briefing is not lost by the Private Secretary at some point during the visit.

Which causes other problems.