A former top MI6 officer has some brisk things to say about the way foreign policy is made in the UK these days – and the consequences:

Mr Inkster said the world was moving from "being policed by America to be policed by nobody" and the danger of an increasingly unstable world meant populations were likely to fall back on the "snake oil and voodoo" of religious and nationalistic movements.

When it came to the conflict between Russia and Georgia last summer, he added, Britain was caught "completely flat footed" and used a strategy that "amounted to little more than moral indignation, which is not a strategy."

Good to see he’s been reading this blog so assiduously.

One of his explanations for this state of affairs is this:

In a speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Mr Inkster blamed weakness at the Foreign Office for allowing Britain to get dragged into a war over which officials had serious doubts.

"The Foreign Office no longer does foreign policy," Mr Inkster said. "It acts as a platform for a multiplicity of UK departments and the lack of a clearly articulated sense of our strategic location in the world explains how we got dragged into a war with Iraq which was always against our better judgment."

This is of course true. Who in the business has forgotten all those querulous insecure attempts a few years ago to persuade Whitehall to buy in to FCO ‘strategic priorities’?

The point is that if you need to persuade them, they aren’t interested and are not going to be. They rather should be quaking in their stained suits and Hush Puppies that the FCO is going to find out that they are not working hard enough to implement them.

It all comes down to Ministers. In the New Labour case, for many years we had two Prime Ministers, namely T Blair and G Brown. TB did mainly foreign with some help from Robin Cook, GB did mainly domestic, but muscled his way in on foreign too by throwing huge sums of wasted money at ‘international development’ and Clare Short.

Hence with all the personal bickering going at the highest level and a massive dis-allocation of the resources available to ‘foreign’, the FCO as an institution was left to wither.

Civil servants are like everyone else – they need motivating and a clear sense of direction from the top. If that falters, decay and listlessness set in.

The decline in basic standards of work and thought since 1997 has been unrelenting and impressive. One reason I myself left.

Does anyone in the FCO or elsewhere in Whitehall seriously dispute this general proposition?