Wallace turns his guns on the Foreign Office

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.