David Winnick
Foreign Office By Denis MacShane
Never has the Foreign Office made a trickier appointment. Very soon the Prime Minister must announce who will be the next Permanent Under Secretary of Britain’s oldest department of state. He – it may well be a she – will oversee the transition to a new Prime Minister. There have been two dozen FCO ministers appointed and shuffled by Tony Blair since Labour took office so the continuity represented by the diplomats at the Foreign Office is of the highest importance to Britain’s national interest. The Permanent Under Secretary is the effective head of British diplomacy. When the new PUS enters the handsome ground floor office with striking modern art reflecting the cultured taste of the present occupant, Sir Michael Jay, he or she will find an institution less certain of its role and place than at any time in its two centuries of existence.
It is not just the rumblings over the memoirs – published or unpublished of ambassadors like Sir Christopher Meyer, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, or Craig Murray of Uzbekistan hair-dresser fame who was given a £315,000 pay-off and has repaid his former employer with serial accusations ever since. It is a sense that the defining of Britain’s role in the world has shifted from the Foreign Office to elsewhere in government and may never come back. Staying cigarette-paper close to the United States and working with EU partners are two self-imposed limitations of modern times on what the FCO can do, but increasingly the money to do foreign policy is lacking and the personnel to carry out foreign policy needs renewal.
The Department of International Development income from the Treasury is nearly three times that of the Foreign Office which has been forced to shut down embassies as its budget has been swallowed up by new costs like paying for embassy security as a result of global terrorism.
International development has been a popular cause for the Labour government chiming with the natural do-gooding instinct of the British people. The British taxpayer has been extremely generous to some of the poorest countries in the world, notably in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzania, for example, has seen its DfID cash increase by 50 per cent since 2001 but has actually become poorer, falling still further down the league table of the world’s poorest nations. The 7 million people of Burundi have seen DfID aid increased ten-fold since 2000 but the nation is poorer today than five years ago. Kenya has received £130 million in aid since 2001 but managed a paltry growth rate of 1 per cent. A courageous FCO diplomat, Sir Edward Clay, has denounced the rampant corruption in Kenya but the FCO presence in poor countries that need better politics and fewer hand-outs is being steadily reduced.
Some DfID spending is unusual. India has received more than £1 billion in aid since 2001 even though India runs its own £350 million overseas aid programme seeking, not unreasonably, to win influence and show its new power status. It may be heresy to the development community but some of DfID cash transferred and spent on promoting trade and investment – which the FCO specialises in – could do more to alleviate poverty. DfID since 2001 has also spent more than £1 billion on UK based consultants – a form of indoor relief for some of the richest companies around. £9 million of taxpayer’s money was spent last year flying DfID officials all over the world as they try to spend sums that the new FCO boss can only dream of.
The real breakthrough on development politics has been engineered by Gordon Brown with his work on debt relief and by Tony Blair who badgered Presidents Bush and Chirac to accept debt cancellation and at least a token commitment to reduce American and EU agro-protectionism at the G8 summit in Gleneagles last summer.
As in business, as in Whitehall, powers depends on how big a cheque you can sign. A large chunk of the FCO budget goes to pay for the BBC World Service, whose top managers are paid more by the tax-payer than the Prime Minister and to the British Council whose earnings from teaching English could be harnessed to private sector initiatives to become self-financing.
A key task for the new PUS will be to nudge Whitehall to think differently about how the UK spends its money overseas. But to do that he or she will have to show the FCO is prepared to modernise. As a minister I tentatively suggested that the FCO might adopt the Army’s approach of “up or out” – based on narrowing the upper echelons to those who have proved themselves and allowing younger faces, more women, and energy unsullied by decades of minding ones back to be unleashed. I was talking to myself. It is sad that it took a political appointment – that of Paul Boateng to be High Commissioner in South Africa – to get a black Briton into a senior diplomatic post. The key embassies are reserved for chaps in suits.
And this will mean taking decisions that go to the heart of the culture of British diplomacy. Too many of the key administrative departments of the FCO – finance, human resources, communications – are in the hands of diplomats who do the job for their allotted stint of three years before going off to what they can do well which is diplomacy overseas or policy at home.
Similarly, the FCO’s communications harks back to the days when calling in a few diplomatic correspondents for a briefing was all that was required. The Foreign Secretary has a press officer good at avoiding bad headlines. But that is not the same as explaining to Britain what foreign policy is and why we have to do it well.
There is a new generation at the FCO who are now challenging out-of-date perks like paying school fees for Eton for all the children of FCO officials. In my experience many are frustrated and would like to see a major make-over. The new PUS will inherit a department that wants to work for Britain. But the FCO will need a thorough-going modernisation and Downing Street – Nos 10 and 11 - will have to rethink how it spends money on advancing British interests around the world. It is the least enviable job in Whitehall.
Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and worked at the FCO as PPS and Minister 1997-2005.
