The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee today published a searching report on the Role of the FCO in UK Government.

Here it is.

And here is my own trenchant evidence, submitted in writing. I am not, it seems, grand enough these days to merit giving oral evidence. Sob.

But read it anyway. I decided not to bang on about grand foreign policy themes and Whitehall structure as that is what most other witnesses would do to good effect. Instead I focused on the neglected issue of Diplomatic Technique itself. And in the process walloped the ruination of New Labour politically correct managementism with real brio, if I say so myself:

12.  Some of today’s excessive process was invented in the previous Thatcher/Major Conservative era, with the ostensibly laudable idea of making government policy processes more "businesslike". But there was (and is) no consensus on what "business" foreign policy actually is. In fact it is a complex mix:

(a)  part consultancy (top-level advice on what is happening and how to respond);

(b)  part agriculture—planting seeds of goodwill and influence, knowing that some will grow into strong plants in years to come but others will not;

(c)  part insurance—developing relations with senior foreign people patiently and deftly when there are no problems in sight, so that when problems occur there is a chance of having essential allies;

(d)  part fire-fighting (making an impact in difficult/dangerous situations far from home); and

(e)  part service provider (consular/visa work).

13.  This is a unique "business" indeed. Because much solid background diplomatic work needed to get results is in the insurance sector and shows no "measurable" outcome, it tends to be devalued in Treasury calculations15.  The last decade or so has seen a startling loss of quality within the FCO, a phenomenon noted by many foreign diplomats. It shows itself most dramatically in what ought to be the centrepiece of FCO work—communication. The FCO no longer communicates well with itself, or with its own knowledge…

16.  The standard of FCO written work—formerly among the most effective prose work ever achieved in the civilised world—has dropped. Even work for Ministers often is not being done properly: submissions are being sent back for reworking as they are so badly written. (Note: I submitted an FOI request about this and was told that there was no information on the subject.)

17.  A number of factors have combined to create and accelerate this decline:

(a)  An idea from a few years ago that work needed to be only "fit for purpose", to save time/resources "wasted" in proof-reading and redrafting. (The point lost here was that creating high-quality work did involve commitment, but such good work had many positive demonstration and operational effects, no less real because they were impossible to "measure".) This change encouraged less good presentation and so less good thought/analysis.

(b)  That in turn has led to a subliminal sense that correcting another officer’s work is not appropriate or somehow stuffily "judgemental". This has come together with the rise of email culture to wreck on-the-job training. Years ago junior officers would be firmly taught by their superiors the fine art of accurate drafting. That has largely vanished.

(c)  No serious sanctions are imposed on people unable to write well, or unable to supervise good writing in their team.

(d)  The wider inability of the UK education system to produce people able to write accurate English is visible in the work of even the top graduates entering the FCO.

18.  The FCO is glumly aware of this and is considering how best to deal with "poor performance". One idea is to move away from "competences" to "skills" in measuring performance. Drafting exams could be set as a condition for getting promoted, perhaps in partnership with an outside academic body, and drafting standards might be raised for FCO entry.

19.  That could make a positive difference over (say) 10 years. But in the short run more drastic action is needed, most immediately in the form of severe sanctions on senior officials presiding over poor quality work.

The Parliamentary website Advanced Search function is v efficient in its links these days so you can pounce on any parts that catch your interest, such as different references in the report and accompanying statements to my own views, of which there are quite a few as I appear to have given different people some food for thought.

For example, here are a couple of extracts from Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s oral evidence, Sir Jeremy being our former Ambassador at the UN and a very serious and experienced diplomatist – to have won his endorsement is good news: 

Colleagues of my age and I played along with the quantification of those objectives, which I thought was irrelevant to the role of diplomacy – how many speeches you made a year, how many contacts you made with other Governments and all the rest of it – because, and this is a point that Charles Crawford made very clearly, the most important skill of a diplomat is his or her judgment.

You can’t quantify the quality of judgment that you get, and the quality of experience that has been learned, in an individual diplomat. So I felt that we spent more time than was justified from the results, or from the utility, on the objectives exercise...

My second preliminary suggestion is that I do not think that Westminster and Whitehall should be thinking too radically about structural change to the Foreign Office. That will not solve any problems. I have seen a number of witness statements so far to you from Daniel Korski and others who have suggested that we might rearrange the furniture in some quite radical ways. That would be a mistake because we need to focus on not where the furniture is placed, but the quality of the furniture itself and particularly the human components of it.

You will therefore find me much more in the camp of Charles Crawford and concentrating on what the skills of the Foreign Office need to be, how they should be developed, how they should serve Ministers and how they should be co-ordinated with the rest of Whitehall. It would be a grave mistake at this juncture to get into radical change of the structure. That is where I am coming from.

Plus I sneaked into the FAC report myself in a few places. Here the Report looks at how far it makes sense to ‘measure’ or quantify the outputs of diplomacy:

Our predecessors were also concerned that, at least as regards foreign policy as opposed to other areas of the FCO’s work, measuring the FCO’s performance was inherently difficult; and departmental performance might in any case be less closely related to actual outcomes than in the case of many other departments, because by definition other states are also involved.

94.  Witnesses to our current inquiry shared these concerns strongly. David Miliband, Jack Straw and Lord Hennessy all discussed the difficulty of measuring what the FCO does;[186] and Charles Crawford told us that performance measurement in foreign policy "assumes a ’cause and effect’ clarity in policy outcome which […] is simply impossible overseas". Mr Crawford characterised much diplomatic work as "insurance", which by definition does not become evident unless and until it is needed

I scored nicely here:

Corporate skills: doing foreign policy

178.  A number of witnesses, most notably former Ambassador Charles Crawford, argued that the FCO needed to improve its skills in what he called "basic diplomatic technique". To use Sir Peter Marshall’s distinction, Mr Crawford’s critique encompassed both the FCO’s "advisory" role (which he called its "consultancy" function) and its executive role, where Mr Crawford said that the department had "no clear methodology of how to make a difference overseas".[346] Mr Crawford saw as especially worrisome what he perceived as the downgrading of FCO standards in drafting and judgement, and urged that far greater attention in the training of FCO diplomats be given to "core technique", especially personal communication. Mr Crawford contended that "without looking hard at first principles of diplomatic technique the FCO is not going to do the job which No. 10 and Whitehall need doing: understanding and influencing foreigners".[347]

And here:

Information and institutional memory

188.  Charles Crawford drew our attention to what he regarded as a further "little-understood cause of quality decline in the FCO", in the shape of the shift from hard copy to email and other electronic forms of communication and data storage. In Mr Crawford’s view, this meant that there was no longer ‘a file’ containing a complete documentary record of the development of Government policy on a country or issue, which could be handed to a member of staff newly arriving at a desk or overseas post. Instead, there is information which is available only electronically and not easily searchable. As a result, in Mr Crawford’s view, the FCO’s "collective memory and collective knowledge has plummeted", and staff can only react in an improvised and thus "banal" way to events as they happen. He recommended that "urgent changes in FCO data management are needed […] to devise new ways to make saving and searching information a proper professional discipline".[357]

And this point on how too little discretion has been devolved to posts overseas:

198.  Charles Crawford and Caterina Tully, among other witnesses, recommended that the FCO’s overseas posts should be given greater autonomy, in particular over the spending of their small amounts of programme funds. Several witnesses said that the disbursement of such funds by posts was currently overly bureaucratic, given the often small amounts of money involved. Mr Crawford contended that "a simple devolution of funds to all Embassies/Missions […] would transform the impact of British diplomacy".[379] On 1 February 2011, the Foreign Secretary announced that the FCO was to "give British Ambassadors greater responsibility for deciding how best to spend their local budgets to support UK foreign policy objectives and strengthen bilateral relationships".[380]

This Report is unusually interesting as such things go, mainly because the sense of horrible despair at the end of the Labour government was such that many senior diplomats queued up to offer their thoughts on how to use diplomacy far more effectively in the UK interest.

The Report’s Conclusions and Recommendations are nonetheless rather bland, although the emphasis on re-establishing strong analysis and judgement – in a word, Technique, is important and welcome:

13.  We support the Foreign Secretary’s wish to see the FCO "at the centre of Government", but we conclude that this will be neither possible nor desirable unless the department is able to provide the Government with deep foreign policy expertise and judgement to underpin and implement its decision-making. We further conclude that the provision of foreign policy information, analysis, judgement and execution constitutes the FCO’s core role for the Government. We recommend that a statement along these lines be the overarching statement of the FCO’s role for the Government…

So, let’s see. how far William Hague manages to sort out Labour’s mess. I have talked to him about these matters on several occasions – his instincts are all in the right place, which is a good start.

I’m meeting a senior FCO person next week to chat about these issues and take stock of how the machine plans to respond to the FAC’s challenge. I’ll let you know.

For now, enjoy Sir J Greenstock in fine form, describing the important role of Incompetence in diplomacy:

In terms of diplomacy – as in observing, analysing, reporting, negotiating and communicating with other Governments – I am still to be convinced that there is a Government less incompetent than the British one in these fields.

Q165 Mike Gapes: Less incompetent?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Less incompetent. I formed the view over my career that all Governments are incompetent in one way or another. Where you have a civil service or a diplomatic service that minimises the mistakes; that can handle complex issues; and that can deal with a number of balls in the air at any one time, you have a comparative advantage against what is out there on the field of competition.

Of course, some of the competition are allies and partners, but you would be surprised – I will name no names – how incompetent very close and admirable allies could be on particular cases. The British would come in, mop up, do the drafting, do the communication with other Governments and try to make the most of the situation. I think we’re very good at that…

Indeed we are