Of course diplomats are frank in private – but not, I fear, for much longer

It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic.

It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic. When asked for a candid assessment by senior colleagues or by his political masters, the murmured ambiguity and the Ferrero Rocher are for the birds. Diplomacy is for dealing publicly with the other side, not privately with your own.

Within weeks of joining the Foreign Office as a young man, I learned that senior diplomats are routinely breathtakingly candid with each other in their confidential assessments of people, nations and situations. We should expect no less of them. Senior diplomats — American no less than British — express themselves undiplomatically when they don’t expect their reports to be published. This too we should expect. ‘A latter-day version of Sodom and Gomorrah’ was the characterisation of Thailand (now available under the 30-year rule) offered by our ambassador in Bangkok in 1973. His predecessor had described the Thai foreign minister as ‘vain, touchy and disputatious… his obsessions… sometimes make one wonder whether he is altogether sane’.

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I learned too that senior diplomats may offer assessments in private that contradict what the politicians they serve have to say in public. That the United Kingdom enjoyed in the 1970s the warm relationship with Canada that we do today did not stop our high commissioner there describing the ‘trendy’ Pierre Elliott Trudeau as ‘mutton dressed as lamb’; nor (a decade later) did it stop a successor high commissioner calling him a ‘cold fish’, and his background that of ‘a well-to-do hippie and draft-dodger’. If such language comes as a surprise to any intelligent observer — which it shouldn’t — then the WikiLeaks disclosures of US diplomatic documents will prove a useful education for them.

But for the rest of us, and for the governments and politicians of whom American diplomats may have been critical, these leaks have far more potential to embarrass than they do to surprise or seriously to wound.