Diplomatic Political Reporting: Say What You Think?

Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008?

I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing telegrams back to the FCO (including my highly praised telegram on the morning after Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic was assassinated), urging the following general rules:

if you want it to be read, make it readable
some things are important – but don’t matter
no stupid words!
don’t be boring

These strictures and accompanying illustrative slides of inter alios Mr Incredible, Clint Eastwood and Spider-Man’s Aunt May caught their attention.

Part of the problem with political reporting is getting right the balance between what HQ wants to know and what it needs to know. Usually HQ is several months behind where any given overseas problem ‘is’ – standard briefs get word-processed and stale, drawing on expired assumptions.

So just as it is right to try to keep HQ up to date, Embassies also need to remember that HQ usually won’t be that interested in anything which significantly changes the ‘narrative’ unless it is dramatic enough to catch the headlines in the HQ country.

Likewise you can say what you like in an urgent telegram, but the dominant thought about any given overseas development back at HQ will be whatever the media are saying that morning about it. Ministers pay more attention to the newspapers read in the car on the way to the office than to diplomatic cables, since any questions they will be asked during the day will draw on that media reporting, even if it is wrong or stupid…

Any public body with the words ‘European’ in the name has horrible problems with ‘the hierarchy’. Information rarely trickles down from on high to the working level, and people have to pull their punches in saying what they think lest the ‘hierarchy’ object.

One interesting issue thus arose. How should a serious middle-ranking diplomat at an EU mission deal with reporting an election in an African country where the result was largely farcical/manipulated? The problem in this case was the fact that the mission hierarchy and EU HQ and indeed many governments round the world were happy enough to hail this wretched outcome as a victory for continuity and ‘stability’. A report calling into question the result as an obvious farce would not be welcomed, or even be allowed to issue.

No easy answer. I quoted my own early disagreements with the British Embassy hierarchy back in 1984 in Belgrade, when I had written the legendary MTS/non-MTS paper warning about problems within communist Yugoslavia. Even though the then Ambassador had disagreed with the paper in important respects, he was gracious enough to send it back to London under cover of a letter explaining what the disagreements were about and what his own view was. London thereby at least had the opportunity to mull intelligently over two very rival interpretations.

This elegant and democratic, clever British outcome was a source of much marvelling amongst the assembled Europeans – none of their bosses would be likely to do anything like that!

So there is no easy answer on how a young diplomat should best deal with a situation where the mission and its policy are at variance with reality, honour and common sense. Of course anyone feeling really upset can launch into the various available grievance/appeal processes, but that merely builds up a reputation as a vainglorious boat-rocker and in any case is a hopeless vehicle for changing policy analysis.

As I said to them, it ultimately comes down to how you want to live. Most of us rationalise such things away on the grounds that it just takes time to change policies, and that much of what ‘policy’ is ebbs and flows anyway. Sometimes it’s better to avoid fighting a losing battle on one issue for the sake of making a difference in another.

If that isn’t your style, resign and do something else. But remember that if you do that, the organisation you’ve left will have one honourable voice fewer – does that really help either?

One final thought.

When I was Ambassador in Warsaw a very senior ex-colleague bow with a global energy company swung by. I asked him what was good or bad about having left the FCO behind.