Andrew Murrison is a former Minister of State at the FCO, DFID and FCDO.
In the huff and puff of the recent FCDO select committee hearings on the Mandelson mess, it is easy to miss evidence from Sir Olly Robbins about the ‘profound restructuring’ of the department from which he was despatched in April by Sir Keir Starmer. We learnt that the FCDO2030 plan hatched by Robbins – now touted as Andy Burnham’s choice for National Security Adviser – involved a ‘radical, brave and often painful programme of major reform’ including substantial redundancies. Sir Olly explained that it was difficult to sell this to his colleagues when he was being obliged by his nemesis Sir Keir to find plum jobs for outsiders like Mandelson and Lord Matthew Doyle. That worries me because, as I will go on to explain, the recruitment of the right outsiders is a key plank in the necessary overhaul of our diplomatic effort.
Institutional reform of the magnitude needed requires political willpower that is sadly lacking in an administration consumed by post-colonial guilt. The likelihood is that the new government in 2029 will be left with a largely unreformed FCDO still populated by biens pensants whose primary focus is not the prosperity and security of the ordinary people of this country. What’s needed is a profound culture shift imbued with the buccaneering, mercantile spirit that once propelled an inconsequential archipelago from obscurity to global prominence, improving the condition of its people beyond the rest of Europe.
With our international trade and foreign affairs happily no longer subordinate and subcontracted to the EU, the UK needs to rediscover its once celebrated diplomatic skills and devices, bending them, unwaveringly, to its own national interests to exploit a multi-polar, post-Brexit reality in which we can expect no favours from the bloc. I became convinced of this as a FCDO minister of state, an experience that inspired my 2022 Policy Exchange pamphlet Brits In High Places.
The ‘blob’ has spied an opportunity following the appointment of Peter Mandelson and the near miss appointment of Matthew Doyle. What the Whitehall establishment will now do is put the kibosh on any senior appointments outside the closed ranks of career diplomats. Ministers, chastened by the Mandelson affair, will submit to civil servants who have always, with good reason, seen outsiders as a threat. This means that, unusually for a Western democracy, the UK will not benefit from talented, motivated people from industry, business, and politics in its top posts. In my experience, such people are exceptionally motivated and laser-focused on advancing Britain’s interests, which these days means business interests.
Robbins was right about the FCDO: It is not fit for purpose.
If you doubt it, take a look at the Chagos debacle. What can possibly explain the lunacy of the surrender deal? Giving up sovereign territory to an ill-disposed state 1300 miles from it, then forking out a hundred million a year to lease it back, purely because a, highly political, supranational court with no enforcement powers issues an advisory opinion requesting we should do so.
That request plainly doesn’t mean we had to give the islands away. It does not even really necessitate anything more than opening negotiations, a box the last government ticked in 2022. After all, there are negotiations and there are negotiations. We can keep the diplomatic merry-go-round spinning indefinitely. Indeed, in less credulous times, procrastination was a favourite device of the Foreign Office.
David Cameron when he was Foreign Secretary mastered this stately dance. But the mandarins saw David Lammy coming. They had his measure. They knew he’d jump at the chance to stick it to the UK’s imperial past. In that mission they were and remain wholehearted, enthusiastic participants. After months of national embarrassment, it took Donald Trump, for goodness sake, to rescue the FCDO from its stupidity. With, we hope, the reading of the last rites on the disastrous Chagos Bill as the last session of Parliament petered out, we are left to pick over the remains of a monumental failure of statecraft.
British foreign policy fails not because our diplomats lack wit – they tend to be among the brightest of civil servants – but because the institution that selects, trains, and rewards them is insufficiently focused on bettering the lives of ordinary Britons.
My overwhelming impression of FCDO top brass is that they are hardworking and decent. They see themselves as high-minded, virtuous, repentant and Whiggish. However, they also give every impression of valuing a purist application of so-called international law above the pursuit of the national interest. Foreign aid and international development is to come before domestic priorities and certainly before defence. Too often, pearl-clutching and penitence appear to set the narrative. Many of our well-meaning officials think that other jurisdictions are more likely to regard the UK favourably if we play nicely and cleave to rules that are too often contrary to our national interest and that others appear to waive with impunity.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they do.
This departmental nervous breakdown did not happen overnight. It is the product of years in which the language of diplomacy was moralised, development policy was elevated into a pillar of identity rather than an instrument of strategy, and Britain’s history was treated not as something to be understood in full – good, bad, and indifferent – but as a standing indictment to be managed. I was there when the Department for International Development was folded into the Foreign Office. You could feel the difference. The result is a diplomatic culture that prioritises the doing of good works over the national economic success necessary to achieve them.
Then came a Labour government led by a left-liberal patrician whose world view fitted the FCDO’s mindset perfectly. A human rights lawyer from Islington, a Europhile, an admirer of international courts – the FCDO could not have asked for more. Unfortunately, the consequence has been a sharp decline in the UK’s status, heft and leverage internationally.
So, what do we do to fix this mess?
Firstly, the mandarins need a good clearing out. It is time to make the recruitment of ambassadors and senior staff from outside the civil service routine rather than exceptional. The most important criteria for an overseas posting is not an Oxbridge first but personal diplomacy, patriotism, and focus on how your actions will impact on ordinary folk back home. Test candidates for those qualities.
I love the story of George Schulz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, hauling new ambassadors into his office and asking them to point to ‘their country’ on a huge globe. When they inevitably gestured to their host country, the wily old bird jabbed a finger on a well-thumbed United States and exclaimed, ‘No Sir, THIS is your country!’ That’s what we need in the FCDO – a gimlet-eyed focus on Britain’s national interests. We need diplomats and civil servants packing out King Charles Street who are single-minded in their pursuit of those interests. That needs to be reinforced every time performance is appraised.
We have to restructure the FCDO and I would start with renaming it. I would call it the State Department. Boris Johnson’s merging of FCO with DFID to form FCDO, a heresy for the left, has been a success in so far as it reduced senior headcount and started the process of bending UK benevolence towards UK interests as well as the doing of good works. I would go further. The old Department for International Trade (2016-2023) should be disaggregated from the Department for Business and Trade and put, together with UK Export Finance, in our newly minted State Department – contributing further to the reduction in overall headcount, particularly senior headcount.
The Department for Business and Trade will argue that its people already work closely on the ground with UK diplomatic missions, which is true. As a trade envoy and minister I saw examples where it worked well. However, a whole-systems approach is needed to realign FCDO with a commercial reality that our competitors seem much better fitted for.
If nothing else, President Trump has reminded us that trade is an instrument of foreign policy – something we had forgotten during the long years under America’s ‘rules-based order’ where trade became ever freer and went ever further. Time to let the grubby business of trade and commerce echo through the grand salons of King Charles Street. Let the cash registers ring out. If Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers, bring it on.
As I write, rumours are circulating that Prime Minister Burnham may appoint his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, as Foreign Secretary. The FCDO would certainly welcome the man, unkindly, branded Mr Process believing it would herald no change. Bureaucratically, it would anticipate rolling on despite Olly Robins’ exhortations, with the canary being an early recommitment to the Chagos deal.
But Britain does not need more sensitive foreign policy. It needs a robust and serious one. We can acknowledge our history without being imprisoned by it. We can act ethically without surrendering strategically. But we cannot continue with a diplomatic service that seeks absolution where it should be seeking advantage. The world is a hard place. It is not a seminar. Whatever we project internationally must reflect that, or we will lose.
Andrew Murrison is a former Minister of State at the FCO, DFID and FCDO.
In the huff and puff of the recent FCDO select committee hearings on the Mandelson mess, it is easy to miss evidence from Sir Olly Robbins about the ‘profound restructuring’ of the department from which he was despatched in April by Sir Keir Starmer. We learnt that the FCDO2030 plan hatched by Robbins – now touted as Andy Burnham’s choice for National Security Adviser – involved a ‘radical, brave and often painful programme of major reform’ including substantial redundancies. Sir Olly explained that it was difficult to sell this to his colleagues when he was being obliged by his nemesis Sir Keir to find plum jobs for outsiders like Mandelson and Lord Matthew Doyle. That worries me because, as I will go on to explain, the recruitment of the right outsiders is a key plank in the necessary overhaul of our diplomatic effort.
Institutional reform of the magnitude needed requires political willpower that is sadly lacking in an administration consumed by post-colonial guilt. The likelihood is that the new government in 2029 will be left with a largely unreformed FCDO still populated by biens pensants whose primary focus is not the prosperity and security of the ordinary people of this country. What’s needed is a profound culture shift imbued with the buccaneering, mercantile spirit that once propelled an inconsequential archipelago from obscurity to global prominence, improving the condition of its people beyond the rest of Europe.
With our international trade and foreign affairs happily no longer subordinate and subcontracted to the EU, the UK needs to rediscover its once celebrated diplomatic skills and devices, bending them, unwaveringly, to its own national interests to exploit a multi-polar, post-Brexit reality in which we can expect no favours from the bloc. I became convinced of this as a FCDO minister of state, an experience that inspired my 2022 Policy Exchange pamphlet Brits In High Places.
The ‘blob’ has spied an opportunity following the appointment of Peter Mandelson and the near miss appointment of Matthew Doyle. What the Whitehall establishment will now do is put the kibosh on any senior appointments outside the closed ranks of career diplomats. Ministers, chastened by the Mandelson affair, will submit to civil servants who have always, with good reason, seen outsiders as a threat. This means that, unusually for a Western democracy, the UK will not benefit from talented, motivated people from industry, business, and politics in its top posts. In my experience, such people are exceptionally motivated and laser-focused on advancing Britain’s interests, which these days means business interests.
Robbins was right about the FCDO: It is not fit for purpose.
If you doubt it, take a look at the Chagos debacle. What can possibly explain the lunacy of the surrender deal? Giving up sovereign territory to an ill-disposed state 1300 miles from it, then forking out a hundred million a year to lease it back, purely because a, highly political, supranational court with no enforcement powers issues an advisory opinion requesting we should do so.
That request plainly doesn’t mean we had to give the islands away. It does not even really necessitate anything more than opening negotiations, a box the last government ticked in 2022. After all, there are negotiations and there are negotiations. We can keep the diplomatic merry-go-round spinning indefinitely. Indeed, in less credulous times, procrastination was a favourite device of the Foreign Office.
David Cameron when he was Foreign Secretary mastered this stately dance. But the mandarins saw David Lammy coming. They had his measure. They knew he’d jump at the chance to stick it to the UK’s imperial past. In that mission they were and remain wholehearted, enthusiastic participants. After months of national embarrassment, it took Donald Trump, for goodness sake, to rescue the FCDO from its stupidity. With, we hope, the reading of the last rites on the disastrous Chagos Bill as the last session of Parliament petered out, we are left to pick over the remains of a monumental failure of statecraft.
British foreign policy fails not because our diplomats lack wit – they tend to be among the brightest of civil servants – but because the institution that selects, trains, and rewards them is insufficiently focused on bettering the lives of ordinary Britons.
My overwhelming impression of FCDO top brass is that they are hardworking and decent. They see themselves as high-minded, virtuous, repentant and Whiggish. However, they also give every impression of valuing a purist application of so-called international law above the pursuit of the national interest. Foreign aid and international development is to come before domestic priorities and certainly before defence. Too often, pearl-clutching and penitence appear to set the narrative. Many of our well-meaning officials think that other jurisdictions are more likely to regard the UK favourably if we play nicely and cleave to rules that are too often contrary to our national interest and that others appear to waive with impunity.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they do.
This departmental nervous breakdown did not happen overnight. It is the product of years in which the language of diplomacy was moralised, development policy was elevated into a pillar of identity rather than an instrument of strategy, and Britain’s history was treated not as something to be understood in full – good, bad, and indifferent – but as a standing indictment to be managed. I was there when the Department for International Development was folded into the Foreign Office. You could feel the difference. The result is a diplomatic culture that prioritises the doing of good works over the national economic success necessary to achieve them.
Then came a Labour government led by a left-liberal patrician whose world view fitted the FCDO’s mindset perfectly. A human rights lawyer from Islington, a Europhile, an admirer of international courts – the FCDO could not have asked for more. Unfortunately, the consequence has been a sharp decline in the UK’s status, heft and leverage internationally.
So, what do we do to fix this mess?
Firstly, the mandarins need a good clearing out. It is time to make the recruitment of ambassadors and senior staff from outside the civil service routine rather than exceptional. The most important criteria for an overseas posting is not an Oxbridge first but personal diplomacy, patriotism, and focus on how your actions will impact on ordinary folk back home. Test candidates for those qualities.
I love the story of George Schulz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, hauling new ambassadors into his office and asking them to point to ‘their country’ on a huge globe. When they inevitably gestured to their host country, the wily old bird jabbed a finger on a well-thumbed United States and exclaimed, ‘No Sir, THIS is your country!’ That’s what we need in the FCDO – a gimlet-eyed focus on Britain’s national interests. We need diplomats and civil servants packing out King Charles Street who are single-minded in their pursuit of those interests. That needs to be reinforced every time performance is appraised.
We have to restructure the FCDO and I would start with renaming it. I would call it the State Department. Boris Johnson’s merging of FCO with DFID to form FCDO, a heresy for the left, has been a success in so far as it reduced senior headcount and started the process of bending UK benevolence towards UK interests as well as the doing of good works. I would go further. The old Department for International Trade (2016-2023) should be disaggregated from the Department for Business and Trade and put, together with UK Export Finance, in our newly minted State Department – contributing further to the reduction in overall headcount, particularly senior headcount.
The Department for Business and Trade will argue that its people already work closely on the ground with UK diplomatic missions, which is true. As a trade envoy and minister I saw examples where it worked well. However, a whole-systems approach is needed to realign FCDO with a commercial reality that our competitors seem much better fitted for.
If nothing else, President Trump has reminded us that trade is an instrument of foreign policy – something we had forgotten during the long years under America’s ‘rules-based order’ where trade became ever freer and went ever further. Time to let the grubby business of trade and commerce echo through the grand salons of King Charles Street. Let the cash registers ring out. If Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers, bring it on.
As I write, rumours are circulating that Prime Minister Burnham may appoint his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, as Foreign Secretary. The FCDO would certainly welcome the man, unkindly, branded Mr Process believing it would herald no change. Bureaucratically, it would anticipate rolling on despite Olly Robins’ exhortations, with the canary being an early recommitment to the Chagos deal.
But Britain does not need more sensitive foreign policy. It needs a robust and serious one. We can acknowledge our history without being imprisoned by it. We can act ethically without surrendering strategically. But we cannot continue with a diplomatic service that seeks absolution where it should be seeking advantage. The world is a hard place. It is not a seminar. Whatever we project internationally must reflect that, or we will lose.