Blogoir

Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.

He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:

Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.

However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.

The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?

Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):

Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
• If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible

These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.

The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.

Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?

Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?

What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap? 

This leads us back to the core policy dilemma, namely how to deal with wicked regimes? Thus:

Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?

The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.

Rather it is 'who decides?'.

We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.

Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.

Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes:

there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: Isolation, or Engagement. And that both can have perverse consequences, because it is impossible to deal with perverse regimes without some perverse outcomes

Isolation (plus or minus sanctions) invariably drags on unhappily, mainly because the regimes are never in fact that isolated: see the wild success of those policies for eg Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Belarus. In some cases the regime may isolate itself, all the better to oppress its own citizens: see decades of North Korea.

Engagement creates different problems. Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This is also where I part company with my former UK Ambassador colleague Craig Murray. Forget his idiosyncratic leftism. My problem is that Craig's books and website lambast almost any 'Western' foreign policy as corrupt, mendacious, duplicitous or whatever. Yet he is almost 100% silent on how in real life to achieve any positive changes for the better, not least in Uzbekistan which is run by a hard-core regime which he knows only too well.

A loyal reader of my latest Commentator piece says this:

My initial instincts would be to disagree mostly with the kind of line you take on this particular issue. I'm a no compromise man on dictatorships. But, as you say, what are we supposed to do with them? If I may say, you make a very convincing case that really makes me think hard.

Let's think about this a bit more, taking for granted that a 'Western' democratic system with a strong legal system is just 'better' than a cruel torturing dictatorship. What should the democracy do about the dictatorship?

One option is to do nothing. Faraway wicked foreigners oppress each other - what's new?

That option is in fact quite often used, even if there is a busy pretence of 'doing something'. Saudi Arabia is the classic example of a system which in most respects imposes odious unfair apartheid-like restrictions on its citizens, and which we studiously treat as a 'factor of stability'. Communist China used to be far worse, murdering millions. As did the USSR.

In all these cases the hard fact that these systems are powerful, ruthless and/or rich compels a certain caution. But does the fact that we 'tolerate' (say) the Saudi system demolish any claim by us to moral superiority? Double standards, they shriek.

No. Any good policy has to be realistic as well as consistent. If you can't stop all killers, it's right to stop those you can stop. To that extent there is solid intellectual and moral territory between 'double standards' and 'no standards'.    

If we nonetheless decide to do something about a dictatorship, what in fact is likely to work, where 'work' means bringing about change for the more pluralistic, preferably without massive violence?

Hold it right there. Why is massive violence bad? Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted recently thus:

What if we think that there are possibilities for more or less peaceful change? Egypt in some ways is a good current example. NB South Africa is always presented as a triumph for peaceful change but of course wasn't.

Libya might have been too, had the Gaddafi elite not reverted to stupidity instead of using its new improved relations with Western democracies to negotiate .

Cuba? Belarus? Myanmar/Burma? Zimbabwe? China itself?

Simply making a short list like that shows just how varied and problematic the challenge is. In each individual case the options range far and wide, as does the prospect of getting allies and building successful coalitions for change. 

Let's not forget too that Western political leaders' main focus is what their voters want. And voters (with rare exceptions) do not put changing the ways of revolting foreign regimes far up their priorities list. Or much taxpayers' money to be spent on the problem. In 1999 Robin Cook realised that it was a good investment to fund anti-Milosevic activities led by myself, and got superb results. 

So in the real world of foreign policy it makes no sense to take a stark 'no compromise' position of substance with dictatorships. They exist, they have UN and other votes, they can export trouble, they probably have Ambassadors in London. Your aircraft may need to fly over their territory, or they may agree with you on various international technical issues. It's complicated. 

You almost always end up with some form of 'engagement'. But the fact of matter-of-fact exchanges and opportunistically looking for areas to build some common ground is not the same thing as having a policy of Engagement aimed at deliberately using a range of options (openly or otherwise) to bring out reforms. 

When in Poland I quietly and privately explored with the then Ambassador of Belarus (smart, energetic diplomat) some ideas for engaging with the Lukashenko elite. But it all fell into the Not Important Enough category in London. Getting anything done there would take a lot of effort and senior time: Tony Blair saw no real upside in this long slog, and plenty of reasons for letting this one quietly fester under 'EU pressure'.

Was that the wrong decision by No 10? Or the right one? It's still festering, but EU governments are still wobbling unconvincingly between Engagement and Isolation.

A huge subject.

My point today is simple. British foreign policy and leadership can make positive changes in unpropitious foreign situations. But simply wanting to make a difference does not get results. Making that happen requires a powerful combination of strong policy determination, operational nimbleness and fine professional technique, an area where the FCO obviously declined under Labour. Plus some money.

What just doesn't help is facile sneering from the likes of the BBC's 'foreign editor' Jon Williams:

WilliamsJon Jon Williams

Any suggestion of MI6 relationship with #Libya into 2011 v damaging to FCO & No10. Til (sic) now claimed UK-Gaddafi ties part of Blair/Brown past

The fact that MI6 had a relationship with #Libya under Brown/Blair and continued under Cameron showed the policy was working, you silly fellow.

The Commentator has published a piece of mine - Torture versus terror - a tale of two resignations - which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of 'complicity in torture' might produce.

It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years in the future to explain why and precisely how some anguished operational choices might need to be made, and how different honourable people might come to completely different conclusions: 

I believe that in the extreme circumstances I faced, I acted – as I was elected to do - in the national interest, by accepting that information and acting on it. Torture is despicable. We work tirelessly at the United Nations and elsewhere to stamp it out.

But I believe that it cannot be right to avoid any action to thwart murderers and so save innocent lives. The relatives and friends of all the victims of the bombings today in London and Edinburgh will be tortured by their grief from this disaster every day for the rest of their lives.

This situation creates appalling policy and ethical dilemmas for us all. Indeed, I myself might be open to prosecution for what I did. If this happens I will plead not guilty but enter no defence and leave it to the jury to decide.

I do not wish to continue to serve as Prime Minister without a clear mandate from voters as to how I should respond in such circumstances.

I hereby resign my seat in Parliament with immediate effect. A by-election will be called in the shortest possible time. I will stand for re-election but not campaign for it. My statement here tonight represents my only policy position and my only public statement in that campaign...

In fact the dilemmas are there already for practical purposes. British police officers have been busy grilling MI6 officers on what if anything they knew or suspected about the treatment in other countries of AQ and other terror suspects.

These issues take us right to the very outskirts of Policy and how it's made. And if you want one of the most remarkable and profound set of answers ever articulated on some of these problems as they come up in a democracy out there on the Limits of Diplomacy, swing by the transcripts of the UK's Iraq Inquiry and have a read of this testimony by an MI6 officer.

Plenty of heavy black redactions for reasons of the highest secrecy, but what's left is gripping and subtle enough. And, in parts, downright magnificent:

Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:

Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.

But what's this?

A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.

Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...

The agonies continue at the LSE over the fact that it took Libyan money.

Here is the sensible memo which an unhappy Fred Halliday wrote on the subject in October 2009. It reads quite well now.

Here briskly defending what New Labour did by way of opening up to Libya is Lord Mandelson:

Our policy goal should be to do all we can, with others, to put such a country on to the path of transition. Opening up its economy, helping it to tap its natural resource wealth, deepening its integration to the rest of the world and stimulating domestic enterprise and business will spur the growth of aspiration, demands for freedom and the spread of pluralistic values in that society.

Contact with the outside world makes a population want more of what that world – its material goods and liberal values – has to offer. The next step is for them to organise in order to resist and weaken the tyrant’s power and, eventually, overthrow him and his regime as, hopefully, will happen in Libya and, in due course, Iran.

The sort of points made on either side of this argument (and the usual clamorous accusations of 'hypocrisy' which get flung in all directions in these situations) are all about a peculiarly difficult policy question: if there is a bad regime out there, how best to promote change?

First, you have to get over the argument that if foreigners want to brutalise each other, that's none of our business. And the related argument that even if we want to do anything, we'll be likely to mess up and make things worse.

All sorts of the usual policy points can be made to and fro on those ones. But let's stipulate for the purpose of this blog posting that it just doesn't feel quite right to do nothing when we see decent people attempting to stand up for the sort of rights we enjoy and being massacred by a tyrant.

So we decide that we do want to do something. But what is in practice likely to work against Bad Leaders?

I have written about the Bad Leaders phenomenon at some length here already. See this.

And this one, which looks carefully at the core weakness in Craig Murray's utterances on Uzbekistan, where the only thing more deafening than his hoots of supposed moral outrage at anything involving 'engagement' with the Karimov regime is his studied silence on any clearly different policy way forward instead.

In this context the Gaddafi case is really interesting.

For years Gaddafi was a loathsome form of post-colonialist national socialist low-life, supporting terrorism in many different forms and showing off about it. Then came the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and a furtive telephone-call to MI6 - Gaddafi would like to offer a deal.

And quite a deal it turned out to be. Not only did Libya work with Western governments to renounce various WMD programmes. It accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie state-sponsored terrorism bombing atrocity!

One of the most impressive Bad Leader policy shifts in modern times - had Milosevic offered such a grand bargain he might still be Serbia's leader.

Bad Leaders may have a keen regard for their undeserving necks. But they also have their professional pride. And if they offer a deal they want to get something real in return. Not only the fact that they are not toppled. Recognition - acceptance - respectability - too.

And that was what we had to offer Gaddafi to clinch the deal. Sanctions were lifted and very quickly Libya started to be treated once again as a 'normal' country.

Not normal in the sense that we believed it behaved in a civilised way at home; it didn't. But normal in the sense that we tried to deal with it as we would any other unhappy dictatorship, namely showing formal respect for its leaders while trying to look for ways quietly to promote better outcomes for ordinary Libyans.

Part of this process involves business deals. Sure we know that the local dictators will find countless ways to cheat their own people. Check out my first-ever LSE book review which has just appeared - cool timing. It looks at a book called Economic Gangsters which aming other things ingeniously tries to calibrate the extent and cost of top-level corruption in Indonesia.

Yes, big business deals enrich the regime. But yes too, they bring in to the regime's structures unfamiliar new processes of accounting, lawyers, rules, standards, transparency and reputation which have to be taken seriously.

These ideas permeate out into the elite and beyond. People start to think about how life might be better if much more of their country's processes were opened up and internationally legitimised. The top leaders start to modify their behaviour - no point in being too openly odious in the run-up to Davos.

Likewise scholarships and academic programmes. Yes, there's a risk that if we bring plenty Libyan students to the UK to learn chemistry they'll help develop WMD technologies when they go home. But yes too, they'll see a completely different pluralistic academic and social atmosphere, their horizons will be far wider, they'll ask questions, they'll end up thinking differently about the world.

And then there are military and intelligence contacts. Yes, talking to the regime's senior hoods somehow reinforces their prestige and power (bad). But engaging with them through visits and other programmes (including training) helps in a drip-drip way to spread better ideas and instincts among the next generation of leaders (hopefully good).

So there is a case for being stern and unyielding towards Bad Leaders: sanctions, threats, UN resolutions and the rest.

But experience shows (apartheid South Africa, Saddam Hussein, Cuba, N Korea, Milosevic, Lukashenko) that these policies drag on for many years with not much to show for them other than making the mass of people poorer for far longer. Not years but decades of fast compounding misery.  

So if isolation does not work, you end up with different sorts of engagement. All largely inglorious and risky, none offering any quick solution to the basic problem - the sheer Badness and tenacity of the Bad Leader concerned.

Stick v Carrot? Or a clever attempt to use both which is hard to sustain cleverly, and risks looking ridiculous when the bad donkey eats the carrot but stays put? A timless and unanswered question.

So I have no problem in principle with the LSE taking Gaddafi's money to run various programmes which it otherwise might not have run. The more so if that was part of an accepted wider international schmoozing of the Gaddafi regime which followed the end of those WMD programmes, and a significant opening-up of Libyan society which went along with all that.  

But there are firm lines to be drawn.

And if LSE cut corners in approving sub-standard academic work from top Libyans as part of the implicuit deal to get that money, we were not spreading good practice to Libya - Libya was spreading very bad practice to us. 

Craig's made a big effort to change his website. Here's the result.

Definitely a cleaner, sharper 'look', although some might wonder about his self-description:

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

The experts in such matters always say that it's best to brand yourself in terms of what you do now and what you now plan to do, not what you once did. Anyway, the substance is much the same as before, viz Craig as the world's most all-wise anti-hypocrisy megaphone but now without added Spellcheck. 

Here he is on the Middle East:

Yet Karimov in the fast (sic) three months had a visit from Hillary Clinton, a new military supply agreement with the United States and new partnership agreement with NATO, an official visit to the EU in Brussels, and new tarriff (sic) preferences for slave picked Uzbek cotton entering the EU. Most people in Uzbekistan have not a clue the arab revolutions are happening, such is state control of meida (sic)

And here's a novel thought:

The Arab people have shown they are more than capable of seizing their own destiny.

Hmm. When was that, precisely? Isn't the real problem that they have shown exactly the opposite: awesome passivity and fatalism in the face of oppression and indignity dished out by their own leaders for far too many decades?

For years, Western commentators spoke of “the Arab street” as a coherent public opinion, but as though (sic) it were natural that such opinion was at complete odds with the views of autocratic leaders, and the arab voice had no potential for translation to action

Well, for years banking on the absence of potential for action was a good way to bet.

Still, Craig's basic point has a modest merit: that 'intervention' may well not have the desired results and/or make a difficult situation much worse. That said, for a grown-up hard look at the general principle of 'liberal intervention' swing by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian:

... there is then a whole range of forms of intervention – from economic carrots and sticks, through diplomatic pressure, all the way to often controversial forms of overt or covert assistance to independent media and opposition groups, training in forms of non-violent action, and so on.

Many of the most genuinely liberal forms of intervention – those which help people help themselves to be free – are to be found somewhere along this spectrum, but well short of armed force. We used them far too little in the Middle East over the last 30 years.

Precisely.

Craig Murray as ever tries to steer a course which no-one else has ever steered. And crashes. Here he is talking about the impact of the weather:

A combination of crazed right wing thinking and crazed left wind thinking, so typical of the UK, is why our airports are rubbish...

BAA invests in only enough cold weather equipment to cope with a mild to normal winter. It has not tied up capital in equipment that may be fully needed only once in every five years. It crosses its fingers and hopes - it has, in effect, no insurance.

It is not of course unique. The philosophy of just in time ordering that transformed cash flows two decades ago, means total collapse if transport is disrupted. You hold no stock, carry no excess of anything.

It is this ideological commitment to short term profit maximisation that makes capitalism an unsafe model for British public infrastructure.

But then there adds to the chaos the left wing rubbish of health and safety culture. A man may not unload bags if there is any ice under his boots. He may slip. All risk must be eliminated and we must live hermetically sealed from our environment.

He's right about the left-wing rubbish, of course. But is 'just in time' thinking all about right-wing 'ideology' and 'short-term profit maximisation'?

I think not.

Forty years ago back in the communist USSR a huge proportion of all food grown rotted in the fields or was lost in useless storage/transport. But over in the capitalist USA a huge proportion of all food grown rotted on the shelves and was eventually thrown away, as the supply chains for filling shops did not have the information management tools to avoid this waste - better to have too much in the stores than too little. (Note: I did a fascinating Harvard case-study on this one.)

You today are an ideological hard-core right-wing capitalist selling widgets. You want to make as much money as possible. Part of doing that - and, of course, of being as 'green' as possible - lies in reducing waste.

You have hard choices. You can decide to make no provision for bad weather or other disruptions and stock only the widgets likely to be sold in normal times.

But you know that if you do this you may lose out at some points to your ideologically hard-core capitalist rival up the road, who is known to be investing in snow-clearing kit and making other precautions so that his shop can stay open and sell widgets come what may.

On the other hand, because you are not spending that money by way of weather insurance you can spend it on enhanced widget design and so have better products to sell most of the time.

In other words, it's a gamble. Different people who believe exactly the same thing reasonably may take different choices about how to maximise their sales.

But choices do have to be made. Imagine my joy to hear a UK Minister on the radio yesterday saying that if as a society we invest in more bad weather kit (snow-ploughs etc) we'll lose other things we might have bought instead. A grown-up!

This applies on the micro-level too. Almost no-one in the UK invests in snow-tyres, hugely increasing the likelihood that difficult slippery roads will be blocked by inane accidents caused by people unused to the conditions.

Snow-tyres cost money. Would the public if given a free vote prefer to keep the £250 or so it costs to fit snow tyres every year and take their chances? I suspect yes, if only because many people would bank on some people being responsible enough to do so, in effect reducing the risk at no cost to themselves - a typical free-rider problem solved in snowy countries by the law compelling everyone to make the change as winter looms. 

The argument perhaps loses some force when it comes to quasi-public quasi-monopolies such as roads or airports which have privileged positions. But even they have to choose and take some chances - investing in more winterisation insurance means less to spend on other facilities the public might like.

I nonetheless name the guilty:

• Oxford City Council: the road from the Botley roundabout into Oxford yesterday was an idiotic disgrace. Stop wasting money on phoney propaganda adverts on buses telling everyone how 'green' Oxford is, and invest instead on stopping the city seizing up when it snows
• Eurostar: yes, I mean you, Eurostar. Even though many trains were going you yesterday came up with the astonishing idea of cancelling the reservations of all your passengers, compelling everyone to queue in inhuman conditions without a ticket system. Vous êtes trop stupides. 
• the M4 motorway authority: what the hell are you doing? How can you be so incompetent that you can't keep all lanes and exits clear soon after a snowfall? The exit to Oxford coming up from London on Sunday evening was a deathtrap of uncleared snow   

In other words, Craig is wrong again. Capitalism is not an 'unsafe model for British public infrastructure'. It has nothing to do with 'capitalism'. It has nothing to do with ideology of left or right, or even about public and private.

Even if it were all about 'capitalism', there is little to be said for the proposition that ranks of risk-free civil servants in drab offices are going to make any better decisions than people in business whose very existence depends upon studying risk closely. Look at the farcical performance of Oxford City Council, presumably one of the more intelligent local authorities in the country..

Everyone has to live with risk and uncertainty. Go for a strong return 90% of the time and then take the hit when things eventually go awry? Or opt for a less strong return 99% of the time?

Look to maximise revenues or 'utility' over 2 years? Or over 20 years? Boldness? Or caution?

The point is that the market alone gives space for both. Indeed, it's the interplay between them that makes things happen at all.

This is odd.

Andrew Heyn as HM Ambassador to Burma has been writing in implausibly frank terms in the Guardian about Burma's forthcoming elections. Or, should I say 'elections', as the form appears to exceed the substance in democratic terms?

Thus:

People here believe that the vote will somehow be fixed, just as the result of the constituitional referendum was widely alleged to have been in 2008. The only thing they are not sure about is how this will be done...

And this from an earlier piece:

This sort of language and the way it is being delivered goes well beyond anything I have seen ever before from any senior diplomat, with the lively exception of Sir E Clay in Kenya who in 2004 had something to say publicly on the issue of Kenyan government corruption:

... evidently the practitioners now in government have the arrogance, greed and perhaps a sense of panic to lead them to eat like gluttons. They may expect we shall not see, or will forgive them, a bit of gluttony because they profess to like Oxfam lunches.

But they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes...

And let's not forget Craig Murray's human rights speech in Uzbekistan.

This Burma case is rather different, an open attack on a ruling elite as an important election looms. It's hard to imagine a more open - even illegitimate - example of 'interference in the internal affairs of the host state', or a way of doing so less likely to make a serious impact on the problem.

Remember Tony Brenton, HMA Moscow? He ended up speaking in comparatively decorous if still critical terms about Russia's human rights record, and what real good did that do:

Craig hits back with usual energy and rudeness at myself and Brian Barder. Worth a read if you can face yet more on Torture, Policy and all that.

I have posted a long comment there:

One of the (few) points of writing this website is to provide a forum for intelligent thoughts for people interested in how government works or not in practice, especially in the foreign policy area.

This is why I refer quite often to the pronouncements of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray. He purports to tell the world how diplomacy works in practice by drawing on his former seniority in public service, but is often simply wrong or howlingly tendentious. So I feel that I owe it to FCO colleagues and anyone else who might be interested to put on the record an alternative point of view.

Anyway, the ever-meaty Spiegel Online has had a good idea, namely to compare the way Craig worked in Uzbekistan with the way the current German Ambasador Wolfgang Neuen operates there.

Neuen was assigned to Tashkent when he is 62, two decades older than Murray was when he assumed office there; Uzbekistan will be Neuen's last post:

The career diplomat makes one thing clear from the very beginning: He will not spare Karimov from having to address critical questions behind the scenes, and he too will meet with civil rights activists -- to an extent he finds reasonable -- who are attempting to strengthen civil society. But all of this is to take place on the quiet. Ambassador Neuen has no intention of openly challenging the regime, or possibly contradicting Berlin's established policy.

That policy consists of cozying up to the Uzbek dictator. The Germans joined, but repeatedly circumvented, the EU sanctions against Tashkent after the Andijan massacre. The entry ban against leading Uzbek politicians was already lifted in 2005 when Uzbek Interior Minister Zakir Almatov was given a special visa for medical treatment in Hanover. And in October 2009, Germany was the leading force behind the decision to lift the EU weapons embargo against Uzbekistan.

Unfortunately the article does not really deliver on its promise, choosing instead to treat its readers to a long account of lurid episodes from Craig's book. It offers no substantive thoughts on what the two EU countries were/are trying to achieve in Uzbekistan, or whether either of them have actually succeeded in making a real difference for the better through the efforts of their respective Ambassadors.

It concludes:

The provocateur and the appeaser, the man who refuses to apologize for anything and the man with an explanation for everything, the man who constantly rubs people the wrong way and the man who fits in everywhere -- they have never met. But it's safe to say that the "Maharaja of Whiskeypur" and "Fürst Bismarck Quelle" have nothing but supreme contempt for each other.

Neuen, in his office at the embassy in Tashkent, whispers almost inaudibly when he talks about Murray: "When you work as a diplomat, you have to understand and accept your job description. The current British ambassador is still cleaning up the mess his predecessor left him."

Murray, in his house in London, almost shouts his opinion about Neuen: "Oh, the Germans! In Uzbekistan, they were always the ones who, of all Western countries, were the most interested in appeasing the dictator. Is that what they've learned from their history?"

Nice idea. Opportunity missed.

Brian Barder and I are deadly ideological rivals. He hews to a number of Old Labour-style positions which (for me) are like the sort of exhibits you find in the gloomier rooms of the Natural History Museum which no-one visits.

More foreign aid! No to swingeing cuts in public services! Russia must not be encircled! More foreign aid! Put Western leaders on trial for war crimes in Kosovo! Did I mention even more foreign aid?!

You get the picture.

But these diehard socialists often do have one great virtue, namely their ability to sniff out drivel and cant wherever they are found (usually of course in the ranks of New Labour). Hence Brian's latest businesslike demolition of Craig Murray and his noisy army of echo-chamber elves:

I respect his moral passion and his furious energy and often admire his quixotic courage.  But on the subject of the use of information that may have (and sometimes probably has) been obtained by torture, the main theme of his post yesterday, he is simply and straightforwardly wrong.  The dozens of admiring and mostly uncritical comments appended to Craig’s post are in many cases even more misguided.

... those who (presumably deliberately) misrepresent Sawers’s speech by juxtaposing what are in fact separate and unrelated extracts from it have some pretty awkward questions to answer.

Constant repetition of half-truths, misrepresentations and downright untruths doesn’t make them valid or reputable.

Who are we mere libertarian conservatives to disagree?

Lib Dem Ministers Complicit in Torture

Scary, huh? I always thought they were prim, well-meaning political vegetarians, not raging carnivore fascistoid extremists.

But Craig Murray knows different. (Warning: he displays a large picture of an Uzbek torture victim.)

Behold Craig's attempt at analysis of Sir John Sawers' speech yesterday:

These are Sawers' key words:

"Suppose we received credible intelligence that might save lives, here or abroad. We have a professional and moral duty to act on it. We will normally want to share it with those who can save those lives."

Sir John said the UK's security service had a duty to ensure any partner service would respect human rights but admitted this was "not always straightforward".

He said: "Yet if we hold back and don't pass that intelligence, out of concern that a suspect terrorist may be badly treated, innocent lives may be lost that we could have saved.

"These are not abstract questions just for philosophy courses or searching editorials, they are real, constant operational dilemmas. Sometimes there is no clear way forward. The more finely-balanced judgments have to be made by ministers themselves."

Now parse that very carefully. It says we do receive intelligence from torture, and we know we do. It says this happens all the time - "real constant
operational dilemmas" - and that the decisions to receive intelligence from torture have specifically been approved by ministers. That means Lib Dem ministers are complicit in this policy.

Let's analyse (not 'parse' - he does not know what that word means) Craig's analysis.

John Sawers did not say that we 'receive evidence from torture ... all the time". He instead suggested that the very nature of operational secret intelligence work throws up all sorts of moral dilemmas. 

The suggestion in his speech was the exact opposite of what Craig said. John is highlighting one possible dilemma, where we get information from a reliable non-torture source which, if passed on to another government where an attack is planned, might lead to suspects there being abused. 

Plus, of course, Craig does not quote this passage from the speech:

If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.

Some may question this, but we are clear that it’s the right thing to do. It makes us strive all the harder to find different ways, consistent with human rights, to get the outcome we want.

Unlike Craig the Independent tackles this head-on:

This is a somewhat startling statement by the head of MI6 declaring that information about a plot involving violence and loss of lives may not be passed on if the country where it is taking place abuses detainees and political opponents. The moral dilemma in those circumstances would be acute and grim.

In reality such intelligence is sometimes passed on through a third party or assurances are sought that the regime receiving it will not behave brutally towards suspects. But Sir John's statement indicates this may not always happen and innocent people have been injured and killed to protect the civil rights of terrorist suspects.

Conclusion?

Craig should be ashamed of himself, expoiting the memory of Mr Avazov to make his trivially inaccurate criticisms of people doing the grown-up foreign policy work he was quite unable to do himself.

Here is the comment I have posted on Craig's site:

Craig,

Hmm, torture and vile regimes again. Let's recall one vast example.

I have just returned from a Mass of Reparation in Buckinghamshire recalling the fates of thousands of Slovenes who were sent back to Slovenia by British forces as WW2 ended, to be murdered en masse by Tito's communists. A young officer Harold Macmillan featured prominently in that horrifying episode.

It still is not clear what motivated the British officers involved. Although it is impossible to believe on the facts of what happened, maybe they genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing - Tito had been fighting the Nazis, as had Stalin. Churchill indeed famously sat down with Stalin, one of the greatest killers and villains in history, to negotiate post-war political issues. Was he wrong to do so?

In all your voluminous writings on the subject of torture as you rail against the status quo, you rarely if ever tell us what you think Western governments actually ought to do.

Your own record as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan was at best ambiguous. You boast in your book about how many Ministers from this regime you entertained at taxpayers' expense. You seemed to think that by patient (and as necessary firm) diplomatic means you could get them to change their ways or at least pursue UK commercial interests.

But above all you engaged with them as they were. What would you have advocated in the way we dealt with Uzbekistan had the Iraq invasion NOT happened?

This is exactly what Sir J Sawers said yesterday. When it comes to protecting the public HMG needs to engage with people and regimes we all dislike, perhaps especially with people and regimes we dislike. What's your precise alternative?

What would you DO if you were a LibDem Minister who is given a GCHQ intelligence intercept from a foreign regime reporting a likely terrorist attack in London based on interrogating a suspect? You fear that that suspect has been tortured by the regime. Do you nonetheless decide to do nothing, in effect ordering the UK police and MI5 not to act on that report (or even try to verify it)?

If that terrorist attack which we might have prevented happens, and 50 people are killed, what is your political and personal responsibility then?

Just for the record, the way you 'parsed' the Sawers speech is trivially dishonest. You say: "It says we do receive intelligence from torture, and we know we do. It says this happens all the time - "real constant operational dilemmas" - and that the decisions to receive intelligence from torture have specifically been approved by ministers. That means Lib Dem ministers are complicit in this policy."

Literally none of that follows from what Sir John said. Feeble.

Update:  see in the Comments a terrific contribution from Michael S who gives excellent background

* * * * *

Craig is back with us, this time sniping at the British Ambassador in Tashkent, Rupert Joy.

What has Rupert Joy done wrong this time? Shock! He's attended a fashion event led by Gulnara Karimova, the glamorous daughter of the Uzbek President:

“Rupert Joy should be deeply ashamed of himself,” the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said when he learnt about Joy’s participation in the style.uz fashion week, organised by Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter Gulnara...

Having enslaved their country to ensure stratospheric profits for themselves, the Uzbek elite and Gulnara Karimova, in particular, cannot but be concerned with their image in the world which they are trying to improve by splashing huge money earned by others on this.

Craig Murray is convinced that Karimova wants to improve her image to strengthen her political ambitions. One of their means of doing this is to involve ambassadors of countries that enjoy a good reputation in the world in her events.

Gulnara did not invite Rupert Joy because she fancies him, but because it helps boost Uzbekistan’s image of respectability even though it is one of the world’s worst dictatorships,” he said.

“Joy’s attendance is in effect an endorsement of both Gulnara and of the whole regime,” the former ambassador added.

To show how cool and tough he is on this subject, Craig boasts on his own site that he has been writing to Rupert to ask him to explain himself and gives his readers Rupert's email address so that they can pile on the pressure.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site by way of comment (fair's fair - Craig has a very open and impressively spam-free comments policy):

I am baffled by your continuing sniping at those who associate closely with Gulnara Karimova, including HMA Tashkent.

How can you brazenly say this:

“Rupert Joy should be deeply ashamed of himself,” the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said when he learnt about Joy’s participation in the style.uz fashion week, organised by Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter Gulnara...Joy’s attendance is in effect an endorsement of both Gulnara and of the whole regime.”

What driveling hypocrisy.

You yourself did something even more outlandish. You invited the lovely Gulnara to the Queen's Birthday Party you hosted in Tashkent, letting her guzzle sausages on sticks paid for by UK taxpayers.

Hard to do more to 'endorse' the regime than that? You write in your very own book how proud you were that she had attended the event - a sign of your own mighty influence:

http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/NRWLCI691651

Maybe Rupert Joy is simply following your own wily example of getting close to the Uzbekistan regime with a view to influencing it by stealth?

This is too much.

Craig, there is just no point in railing against a former colleague who is doing exactly what you did!

Do stop it. You're making all us former Ambassadors look ridiculous.  

Former Ambassador turned 'activist' Craig Murray is a commendable phenomenon for self-publicity. His website now attracts a considerable following, far higher than this modest effort.

But he achieves this in part by rehashing old FCO material, and noisily claiming to gullible readers that it shows all sorts of things (eg 'complicity with torture') when it just doesn't.

For a classic example, see this posting where Craig presents as new material various redacted documents which he has previously published. Craig Spart-style Trot adjectives and adverbs gush forth:

An FCO source warns me this morning that a vicious rearguard action is being fought within the FCO, to ensure that any government inquiry excludes my evidence and does not consider whether there was a policy of complicity with torture...

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act the final documents in the Tashkent series. These show beyond doubt that there was an official policy of obtaining intelligence through torture...

The picture built up by these documents is overwhelming and undeniable evidence of a policy of complicity in torture, even despite the censorship by government.

No, it's not. As previously pointed out here.

Now, as well as being rude about his former boss Linda Duffield and swiping at the blandly inoffensive Westminster Foundation for Democracy - is nothing sacred? - he wants the taxpayer to spend precious money on a new enquiry into the way his own turbulent case was dealt with by the FCO.

Maybe that would be a good idea, if Craig were to agree to pay back to the taxpayer the very large sum (£350,000+?) he was given by the taxpayer on leaving the FCO were any such enquiry to find that he had been treated fairly and honourably?

Sorry not to have been more active recently, folks. But I have had to travel to Stuttgart, Geneva, Warsaw/Cracow and now Brussels all in the past ten days, while keeping an eye on our attempts to sell Crawford Towers.

My latest manoeuvres involved leading a course on Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy. I tried with some success to distinguish between home-based dilemmas, which typically should be managed within the HQ organisation's rules and house culture, and dilemmas at an overseas posting where relationships between colleagues are completely different and things look and feel different.

Plus overseas postings are where policies collide furiously with real life, throwing up all sorts of moral and operational conundrums (or, lawks, should that be conundra?)

What, exactly, is an ethical dilemma for a diplomat representing a democratic country? After all, a dilemma is a dilemma only if you treat it as such - otherwise it's a fact of life.

Should a diplomat brush private moral concerns aside, saying that if the policy has been approved by a fairly elected government in a lawful way, that sets a sufficiently robust moral framework of checks and balances within which to operate?

NB this is not the same as a bland "I was only obeying orders" defence as used by Nazi concentration camp guards, since it presupposes a substantively fair and democratic process leading to the policy concerned - in such cases it arguably is reasonable for an official to outsource part of his/her own conscience to that wider process of consultation and debate.

In any case, what is a fair way to allow diplomats to express private reservations and have them taken into account? And, then, if such a procedure is available but fails to give the unahppy civil servant enough moral certitude, then what?

Should a diplomat who feels that a given policy in aim or outcome is inherently immoral simply resign? Why not? 

One of the few examples of a senior diplomat resigning on an issue of principle was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, an FCO Legal Adviser who in 2003 chose to leave public service when she could not accept that it was lawful to use force against Iraq without a new UN Security Council resolution.

She made a prominent case that the invasion of Iraq was unlawful and so in one or other sense Just Wrong. But let's remember that a significant number of her Legal Adviser colleagues either disagreed with her on the core arguments or, if they saw decisive force in her argument, nonetheless decided to stay within the system and pursue their moral choices in a different way.

Watching this the general public might be tempted to think that the likes of E Wilmshurst and C Murray are in some ways heroic figures, whereas their colleagues who did not leave the system were less principled or even cowardly.

However, would the public really want all the heroic principled people to quit the FCO or the civil service, leaving the shop run by only snivelling jellyfish who remain behind?

One of my very first postings here touched on all this:

Maybe I had lacked imagination previously, but this episode brought home to me for the first time that in my own rather limited and indirect way I was a non-trivial part of (and as it turned out some sort of spokesman for) an elaborate process which had led to some people far away dying violently.

That a diplomatic service career sometimes involved grim moral dilemmas. And that if that was not what I was ready to face in a job, I should get another one.

I still think about that night. For a few hours I was one of the few voices available to the public defending an unpopular UK government decision which had led to military action and numerous deaths in Libya.

I was not myself in any way involved in the policy chain which had brought that decision about. Yet surely as a promising middle-ranking FCO policy officer I somehow had to be seen as more 'involved' in some of the moral responsibility coming with that policy than eg a cleaner or messenger, even if cleaners and messengers themselves played an important functional role in helping that policy be delivered.

Anyway, it was an interesting course which helped shape my own thinking in new ways. 

Is the nice point about training that the trainers often learn more than the course participants?

Craig Murray offers some thoughts on where significant cuts might be found in the UK diplomatic effort.

It includes this:

... our Embassies in EU countries remain among the biggest and grandest we possess, reflecting the days when our shifting bilateral relationships with European nations were literally matters of life and death, war and peace.

They are magnificent and madly over-staffed by crazily over senior people. They are a great relic of a bygone age, institutions so grand that their overwhelming presence masks their lack of purpose.

Something in this, although of course many of the UK-based members of our Embassies in Europe are not FCO people anyway, so once again Craig makes a populist noise but gets the core of the argument wrong.

Do we really want to cut to nothing the numbers of people working in sensitive Embassy liaison jobs dealing with drug and cigarette smuggling, or preventing illegal immigration, or promoting UK business? When we instead could cut wasteful foreign development assistance and pay for all these services and eg beef up global anti-corruption initiatives?

In any case, the issue is much wider.

Successive governments have given the EU the right to take decisions binding on us (and on everyone else) by voting. This means that in the case of utterly stupid EU Directives such as the one attempting to control our working hours, the UK economy may be dramatically worse off (extra and unnecessary NHS costs running into billions of pounds) if this Directive gets agreed in the face of our strident opposition.

Which is why it makes sense to have serious UK diplomatic lobbying firepower deployed not only in our own capital and in Brussels, but also in EU member states capitals.

It is (FACT) not realistic to lobby effectively on many highly technical EU issues by telephone or by flying visits of London-based officials. Apart from anything else, some of the people who may be most difficult or need persuading may not speak English, or may be in parts of the local bureaucracy unknown to our London/Brussels teams.

Only an Embassy can see the local scene as a whole and work out where precisely in the system (bureaucracy/Parliament/media or all of them simultaneously) it makes sense to apply special arguments or offer policy deals. It is too risky to leave it to the Brussels people to haggle on the spot - by the time they arrive there, our rival delegations' positions will tend to be set in stone and our chances of blocking a ruinous vote against our interests could be gone...

In short, it is a damn good national investment to maintain significant senior lobbying in a good number of EU capitals - the sums of money at stake far outstrip the puny savings Craig identifies.

For a more detailed explanation of all this, see here.

I have no problem with Craig's idea of scaling back our consular effort (ie the work diplomats do to help Brits who get into trouble overseas), as much of that either can be done by commercial insurance schemes for travellers or not done at all.

But to make that sort of saving requires Ministers frequently to go on TV and tell the great British public that if they hit robbery or illness or earthquakes or volcano dust on their travels overseas, they'll mainly have to sort out their problems for themselves.

And when weeping angry relatives then appear on TV raving against government insensitivity and mean-mindedness after some disaster has hit their family somewhere beyond our shores, Ministers will have to say "Life's tough - don't say you weren't warned...".

Not quite what I expect to happen.

A day with my nose press'd hard against the perspiring computer screen writing scenarios for a new course which I lead later this month, all about Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy.

As far as I know this is a pioneer course, the first of its kind to be taught to professional practitioners by a former Ambassador.

My general theme is that a diplomatic career brings with it all sorts of explicit or implicit ethical dilemmas. I have written about some of these on my site here, including this example - one of my first ever postings - arising from the US bombing of Libya in 1986.

Part of my research for this course has involved getting from the FCO, UN and elsewhere examples of the sort of guidance they give on ethical issues. In practice this comes down to all sorts of Rules and accompanying procedures on giving effect to Honesty/Integrity, Fairness, Transparency and so on.

Plus there are detailed guidelines on what to do if civil servants feel that the instructions they are getting are incompatible with their private conscience or are otherwise professionally suspect.

The sassy Dutch Foreign Ministry of course does a great job, giving its diplomats lots of simple scenarios where ethical dilemmas arise (eg gettings gifts from foreign contacts, conflicts of interest), then cleverly adding new factors to each scenario to show how moral choices get complex precisely because the different official guidelines may point in different directions of outcome or behaviour.

My conclusion?

Diplomats need to be guided by three things:

• the Rules
• their heads
• and their hearts

Sometimes those three indeed point to quite different practical ways forward, especially in cases when high policy gets tangled up in immediate tactics - and even one's own professional future.

It's fine a Ministry offering you all sorts of ways to 'blow the whistle' on corruption among your superiors. But can you be really sure that if you try to do so, the system will not hit back at you in self-defence? Achieving fleeting media fame as a whistle-blower, but then drifting into career limbo is not necessarily a good outcome?

What if you get urgent intelligence information pointing to some sort of calamity which you can not use to save lives without risking revealing the source and losing other vital information later?

And which is in practice better, and/or what do the public want their diplomats to do?

To go for bold speedy outcomes eg on human rights in benighted foreign lands but risk the death of key local activists, or to chip away at steady slower modest change? The Craig Murray saga offers us all vivid examples of how to be brave and dramatic - and professionally 100% ineffective. 

Myriad questions. Maybe I'll find the odd answer here and there.

If anyone wants me to run this intriguing course for their colleagues or institution, just let me know: mail@charlescrawford.biz

Ben Rogers writes a lengthy piece over at Conservative Home urging an energetic approach by the new UK government on international human rights:

The Commission has also recommended the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Human Rights, who would work with the Minister of State to co-ordinate the efforts of diplomats and embassies in addressing international human rights, and oversee the work of a range of Special Envoys on thematic human rights issues – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; religious freedom; human trafficking; women’s rights, for example.

These could either be diplomats with a proven track record in these areas, or respected human rights campaigners from the NGO sector. The United States, the Netherlands and France have similar positions, and it is time the United Kingdom did too.

Such appointments would be an important demonstration of human rights being a centre-piece of foreign policy, not simply an after-thought. They would represent a serious expansion of the currently woefully under-staffed human rights and governance unit at the FCO.

While kindly agreeing with me on a number of FCO reform ideas, he disagrees over FCO bloggers:

I disagree, however, with Crawford’s suggestion that ambassadorial blogging should end. I believe in this day and age, such blogging – especially on democracy and human rights – is a very valuable source of information to the outside world, and solidarity with courageous dissidents and activists.

Our former ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, now in Zimbabwe, blogged regularly during key events such as Cyclone Nargis and Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, and I admire him for it. His successor Andrew Heyn has followed suit.

I also disagree with the idea of freezing all FCO training. I think preparing diplomats for understanding the key human rights issues in countries to which they will be posted is essential, and it needs to be strengthened not cut.

As for blogging, the main reason to end Ambassadorial and other overseas diplomatic blogging is that it arguably tends to reduce that Ambassador's local impact where it matters.

Any host government, obnoxious or otherwise, is bound to start to wonder what the point of this person's posting really is.

Is it to act as a means for hard-nosed reliable confidential communication between the two capitals? Or to make a public noise in favour of some or other pet project? Are all those blog posts meant to signify official UK government thinking, or not? What's going on here? Ignore him. It's not serious.

My point on freezing training was merely to identify in a ruthless way which training makes operational sense, and to dump junk training which does not.

What in fact is likely to make a difference in training young diplomats in being effective on human rights issues and so helping a feisty new ConLib government make a sustained difference in hard places?

Lectures from the human rights establishment on UN best practice and international conventions?

Tips from MI6 on how best to help hard-pressed local human rights campaigners without being too obvious to oppressive local authorities?

Lessons in good drafting technique aimed at helping get principles and detail reported back to London in an impactful way?

A case-study on the contrasting approaches taken by FCO legends Craig Murray, Charles Crawford and Philip Barclay in dealing with oppressive regimes as on-the-ground diplomats - what worked and what didn't?

Not easy to give a simple answer.

But whatever the Policy, it all comes down to Resources - and Technique.

Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent:

There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova's multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax - which owns Uzbekistan's most valuable economic assets ... Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov.

And we all recall what an appalling piece of work Gulnara is:

... charming and girlish ... in a simple dress and laughing eyes ... giggling at my light conversation...

The other day I bumped into a long-lost colleague from MI6. We exchanged some Balkan yarns.

He had done superb work for HMG and Western civilisation by taking a deep breath and diving deep into the darkest Balkan cesspools, where war crime suspects meet football club gangsters and cigarette smugglers in tawdry late-night casinos. To such an extent that his accurate intelligence information thereby gleaned was not trusted back at HQ - to HMG's detriment.

The point about diplomacy is that in one way or the other we need to deal with the world as we find it, Gulnara and Karadzic and Karimov and North Korea and all.

Where I part company with Craig is that he boasted about his access to the higher parts of the Uzbekistan system but instead of using that access to make a systematic and significant difference, he turned all his fire and energy on his own team.

And got precisely nowhere in terms of changing Uzbekistan for the better.

Poor technique.

Craig Murray came out for the Lib Dems and so finds himself in the novel position of supporting a Conservative-led coalition:

I can say that I can broadly support this government and am convinced that it will be an improvement on the bunch of authoritarian war criminals who have been replaced.

You nailed that one, Craig. Welcome back on board, even if your army of fans seem somewhat divided on your good sense.

Another former FCO colleague turned diehard Labour blogger (and Long Sentence Champion of the Universe), Brian Barder, is less happy:

Mr Cameron can’t realistically expect a sober and constructive opposition if he constantly accuses Labour of responsibility for the financial mess we’re in, and misrepresents Labour’s 13 years in office as an uninterrupted chronicle of mismanagement and failure — as the irredeemably, jejunely tribal William Hague, our new foreign secretary, was doing without a shadow of embarrassment on the radio this morning.

We old dips have a phrase for it, Brian. It's called kick 'em when they are down - and richly deserve it.

Plus both you and Craig have long called for war crimes charges against key Labour leaders - whatever nano-sized successes they achieved in all those years surely pale into insignificance against that?

Guido shows himself to be a true man of principle. Having called lustily for the ConDem outcome, he is not wasting time pointing to some, hem, unsatisfactory aspects of new Ministerial postings.

So far so good for my old friend from the legendary St John's College conservative machine, Alistair Burt, who joins the FCO as a junior Minister.