Today’s Independent carries speculation about a pending reshuffle amongst the mandarins of the Foreign Office.
FCO staff I have known have been of a high quality, and those at the top tend to know their onions. That’s how they got there.
But there is one persistent and strange failing; they have never seemed quite as on the ball as Treasury officials when it comes to the European Union; and after a posting over there – how can I diplomatically put this? - often seem a little too fond of the moules et frites.
The FCO has two key problems with respect to Brussels. One is that it has become trapped in its thinking, and - despite the 1980s - continues to see its own role within the EU in terms of the management of British decline.
A real legacy for William Hague would be to end this defeatism.
The second problem has been some of the staff themselves. Trained up and promoted through this atmosphere, it has steeped into their souls and fogged up their thinking. So Mr Hague also has the task, if he is to find the solution, of bringing in the right people to jolt the staff out of this rut. I would suggest, for instance, that such a shortlist does not include former heads of UKREP, or British diplomats who have been critical of the Conservatives seeking to leave a political group that carries a federalist agenda (the EPP).
For long years, the Foreign Office has been in denial about the loss of sovereignty to Brussels, and the steady erosion of its own role to the emerging EU diplomatic corps. It is too competent to have held this position through incompetence, so it must have been a conscious choice. Therein, I suggest, lies the Foreign Secretary’s primary task over the coming years; to inject some backbone into Britain’s representatives overseas, and more worryingly, at home. And perhaps the first step is to borrow someone from the Treasury side of King Charles Street to make it happen.
