Uh oh. This time, it seems, mandarins at the Foreign Office have finally gone too far. In a scathing piece penned for the Telegraph, former defence secretary Ben Wallace has opened fire on civil servants after the Foreign Office drew up a statement on the death of Iran’s president. Ministers have refused to use wording supplied to them to call the demise of a man dubbed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ a ‘tragedy’. And Wallace has more to say on it all too…
Taking to the paper today, Wallace questioned: ‘In what world was it the correct thing to do to stand in silence for the Iranian president?’ Turning to longer-standing problems with the institution, including failings in Sudan, Kabul and Ukraine, the ex-defence secretary fumed that it would be ‘hard to pick out a low point’ from his former dealings with the Foreign Office ‘because there were so many’. His blistering attack went on:
The Foreign Office seems to be governed by two principles. The first is ‘not to upset anyone’, even if it comes at the cost of Britain’s national interest. The second is that it has an overwhelming ‘duty of care’, not to UK citizens but its own workforce. No sacrifice, no putting Britain first, no risk, and definitely no recognition that in today’s world you need to be good at ‘playing chess’ with your opponents. Instead, we have a Foreign Office that hides behind protocol and pomposity.
The blame for this lies not with our ambassadors but with a HQ in King Charles Street that has removed authority from them. The Foreign Office’s leaders, past and present, like Lord Macdonald, have reduced our ambassador network to being postboxes for centrally crafted policy nonsense. Foreign Office HQ doesn’t practice mission command or devolution, and ignores the knowledge of our people on the front line.
Ouch. And he wasn’t done there, continuing:
Time and time again, the phrase ‘duty of care’ was bounced around meetings by the Foreign Office permanent secretary. It was the ‘duty of care’ mantra that saw us evacuate the Kyiv embassy to Poland when we didn’t need to. It was the ‘duty of care’ that saw King Charles Street demand that diplomats and military personnel left Sudan, even when we had a benign foothold in Port Sudan. But if the duty of care mantra didn’t get you, the overwhelming desire by Foreign Office mandarins to not upset anyone saw us time and again fail to take sides.
Talk about a dressing down. Will Foreign Office pen pushers take note? Maybe when their ears have stopped burning…
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