By guest author Charles Crawford, former ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw
The Foreign Office has been trying to bring in new, stricter rules governing how diplomats write about their careers after they leave the Service. Let me confess my own role. Twice as an FCO official I played a part in squashing the British public’s hopes of seeing fascinating confidential official documents.
Back in the mid 1980s, as FCO Resident Clerk, I helped obtain an injunction to stop the Glasgow Herald publishing a trenchant diplomatic despatch by our former Ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Sir James Craig, on 'Arabs'. And as Deputy Political Director in 2000, I advised against permitting Sir Ivor Roberts (then still in the FCO) to publish his blunt conversations with Slobodan Milosevic from his days as ambassador in Belgrade.
The first case was easy. A civil service plankton had leaked Sir James' despatch to cause disruption and embarrassment. Sir James had written his views in confidence, expecting that confidence to be respected by his colleagues. Whack! No.
The second case raised different issues. Sir Ivor was still a serving diplomat, Milosevic still in ruthless business. My view was (and is) that high-level diplomatic material of that sort should be kept from fairly immediate public scrutiny. Foreign leaders won't talk to us frankly if they think their words will be plastered over the media. And besides, serving officers should not be writing such memoirs when the policy issues and personalities concerned are still 'live' – it's a matter of simple in-house discipline.
The Foreign Office decided to try to tighten things up in the wake of successive controversies over former ambassadors' memoirs. Sir Christopher Meyer's book DC Confidential, which detailed the build-up to the Iraq war, made headlines (and money), but was dismissed in the Independent as the 'secrets of a smug smoothie', and not many secrets at that. Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand described with raw (bizarre?) honesty his rows with the FCO over US/UK policy towards Uzbekistan where he was ambassador. Murray left the FCO in a blaze of mutual acrimony. Meanwhile Sir Jeremy Greenstock, previously HM Ambassador at the United Nations and involved in top Iraq policy decisions, was blocked by the Government from publishing his account.
The House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee has reported its views on these rules, expressing in brisk terms its concern that they are 'excessively wide-ranging and oppressive'. In fact no reliably good answer is available. Over-prescriptive rules in this area tend to be oppressive and unworkable. Yet general principles based on integrity and ‘good sense’ will not stop people whose supply of one or both is at best modest.
In practice very few former diplomats want to publish provocative, damaging policy revelations. They make a fleeting noise, not so much damaging as embarrassing. And in these days of Free Information the government has bigger confidentiality worries than leaky disaffected civil servants. Much more corrosive to good governance in the UK are high-level accounts of ongoing political divisions and bickering from former Cabinet Ministers and No 10 insiders. Like fish, governments rot from the head.
Charles
Crawford blogs at www.charlescrawford.biz. This post (and that
blog) are not censored by the FCO.
Cutting the legs from under Ambassadors in this way effectively emasculates their role, and creates them as talking heads repeating whatever Zionist claptrap Mr Miliband thought of when he woke up this morning.
Much of the value of having an Ambassador at *all* is in the process of checks and balances in Foreign Policy - they act as a filter to prevent the loonier ideas and kneejerk idiocies of a chickenhawk thug like Miliband from resulting in a crisis, or war.
If Ambassadors are going to be gagged and prevented from saying what they themselves think, and instead turned into Miliband parrots, then there is no point having them at all, and Britain could save a lot of money by scrapping them.
Craig Murray - whatever his private life may have been - was a courageous man who took the trouble to find out in great detail what was going on in Uzbekistan. He was fired because what he saw and heard locally was supposed to be swept under the carpet - because the gutless twonks at the FCO were licking yankee bootleather as usual, and making nice to a violent dictator in exchange for the rights to station American airbases there.
When is Britain going to cast-off the cord to Washington, and tell the yankee-doodles to go to hell? Sucking-up to tyranical despots because they're Uncle Sam's buddies is not in Britain's interests, and is a gut-wrenching travesty of what British diplomacy is supposed to achieve.
Gagging our Ambassadors overseas with the Stars & Stripes is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
Posted by: Neil McGowan | Wednesday, 06 August 2008 at 07:28 PM
Neil, I agree with your points but you will have to let go of your idealism about Britain eventually - you seem to live with an ideal of Britain that you supposed was once great and fair and right and just and you can't stand the values of modern Britain and its politics. However, you are in an illusion if you ever thought it was once any different - the British have always been warmongers and invaded other people's lands and territories, they did not do this by being just and fair and good as a nation. Whatever Miliband and Brown and Blair represent to you and many others today is just the true face of Britain; it never has been any different.
Posted by: loppo | Wednesday, 06 August 2008 at 07:42 PM
Why should one be surprised? In our great nation, this treasured isle, the cradle of democracy, shutting the mouths of diplomats is fairly mild behaviour.
Posted by: john problem | Thursday, 07 August 2008 at 08:05 AM
We are living in the 21st century and "warmongering" is the last thing we should be engaged in. For that reason, we do need to remove the shackles which seem to attach us so securely to the US. The Labour party, as anyone remembers it, is dead in the water, because of what it became under Tony Bliar.
I would rather have someone with the passion of Craig Murray as a diplomat, than some sycophant, who is forever bowing to undue pressure. This is no far fetched idealism, but simple honesty, which will go a long way to repairing the damage of our recent dubious foreign policy.
Posted by: AndyUK | Thursday, 07 August 2008 at 02:37 PM
I have often wondered why the little island of GB has had such an impact on the world in the past 400 years and could it be that it is very very boring on this tiny island sorting out the problems of the British public. Rather than sorting out the petty problems of British people, better to go out and stick one's nose into other people's affairs. It means we don't have to deal with our own such as
1) crime
2) outdated monarchy
3) extremely high cost of living
4) lack of housing
5) poor education
6) litter everywhere
7) poor public transport
8) run down towns and cities and large unemployment
9) drugs and alcohol problems in youth
10) lack of family and community
11) bad health care and dentisry
oh the list goes on and on....no government in the past years since the war have ever really dealt with Britain and its problems....it is too boring and as Tony Blair showed, he is a born show off and wated to be recognised on the world stage - sorting out our problems would never have been enough for his massive ego
Posted by: simon | Thursday, 07 August 2008 at 06:42 PM