Blogoir: January

The Guardian this morning has a piece on the chilly state of what it calls 'Anglo-Russian' relations.

The 'Anglo' word rings strange in this context these days. It appears to make England the focus of such problems while having nothing to say about the surely similar and weighty responsibilities of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Russian government's disagreement with London over the British Council and its status intensifies.

Points worth bearing in mind include:

• most if not all governments including the Russians 'sell' (or at least levy an administrative charge for) certain things through their Embassies abroad as part of normal diplomatic business (see eg visas)
• the British Government set a fast pace for other governments in finding ever more ingenious services to sell at home and abroad to raise ever more money. See eg the intense pressure from HQ on our Embassies to charge UK businesses for commercial advice, not to mention on HM Ambassadors to charge businesses for events organised for them on Embassy property (my Embassy in Warsaw had a strong record in this area...)
• the British Council likewise takes in a lot of money round the world for organising language exams of all shapes and sizes
• all this is clearly not 'commercial activity' in the normal sense - the aim is not to make a profit but to cover costs (although some British people might wonder if they did not already pay taxes to cover such costs, plus what exactly is a 'cost' in such circumstances? Are eg overheads in London included?)
• when Embassies and eg the Council start to charge non-trivial fees for offering services already offered by the open market (commercial advice, entertainment space, language courses and exams), those businesses/bodies already offering such services (some of which may be 100% locally owned and run) start to wonder about the cost structure of this activity, and eg why they are paying local taxes and HMG and its organs not - how fair is this 'competition'?
• and how far if at all does normal international law covering diplomatic activity which emerged in very different times address such matters?
• such questions for the Council gets entangled round the world with other issues concerning the British Council's diplomatic status, or otherwise. In some countries for reasons of history or tradition or security or convenience the Council is part of the formal diplomatic presence. Elsewhere not.

Therefore what?

Therefore nothing. Each case is different.

There are plenty of ways of dealing with such bilateral issues in a measured, prosaic way which rambles on more or less amicably. But in this case we see high-level diplomatic protests and recriminations, and now the Russian police sent round to 'question' local staff of the Council's Russia's offices in a way which looks all too like undisguised intimidation. So it is safe to say that the real issue is not the British Council and its fees at all. Which we all know anyway.

As a senior (and skilled) Russian diplomat once wittily said to me when I argued against Moscow linking Russian minority rights questions in Estonia to energy supplies, "Nothing is linked. But everything is linked..."

Moscow, Sunday 3 October 1993

At an Embassy picnic in the Moscow suburbs that afternoon news started to come through that the extended sit-in at the Russian Parliament by President Yeltsin's opponents had turned violent. We jumped in our cars and returned to our various flats in central Moscow. I went to the Embassy, bravely leaving my wife and small sons at home, much closer to the shooting than I was.

Dramatic events were unfolding: an attempted coup against Yeltsin by armed hard-core Communists and a rag-bag grouping of religious and nationalist 'Red-Brown' (ie fascistic) extremists. A crowd of anti-Yeltsin demonstrators had broken through the police lines surrounding the Parliament building by the river to join up with anti-Yeltsin politicians occupying the building, led by Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. Rutskoi had made a dramatic speech urging the seizure of the lofty Ostankino radio/TV tower on the Moscow outskirts - success here would have helped convince Russia's far-flung regions to help bring Yeltsin down. Long convoys of anti-Yeltsin people raced out towards the tower, with pro-Yeltsin security forces speeding there too. All rather chaotic and undignified.

At the tower a significant and undoubtedly dramatic gun battle ensued as night fell. Key pro-Yeltsin army units had to be brought to Moscow from (it was said) potato-picking duties to help the defences. Back in central Moscow middle-class pro-reform supporters started to put up barricades.

In the Embassy we were working flat out to get a balanced sense of this drama back to London. In the confusion what was apparent was that this was not a mass phenomenon. Apart from the real enough battles in a few streets around the Ostankino tower and the pro-Yeltsin demonstrations of a few thousand people in the city centre, the whole of Russia was doing an impressive job of either being blissfully unaware of all this or waiting patiently to see who won.

In a quiet moment we watched the BBC live broadcast. The reporter breathlessly proclaimed to the planet, "This is an uprising of the people of Russia against President Yeltsin!" Apart from being utterly and absurdly untrue, this message undermined the pro-reform, pro-European tendency in Russia just when it needed Western encouragement.

The next day there ensued the famous 'Siege of the White House'. The anti-Yeltsin forces had been defeated at the Ostankino tower and had fallen back to the Russian Parliament building. They were surrounded by pro-Yeltsin military forces who eventually forced them to surrender. The Wikipedia description of all this is alas highly tendentious. For all the media images of high 'Russia in Crisis' drama as tanks made a huge noise mainly firing blanks at the building to demoralise the occupants, a few streets away people were shopping normally. We have family video footage of our two small sons playing in the courtyard of our block of flats not far from the White House with the crackle of gunfire in the background. 

I later heard that one well-known UK TV journalist made a total fool of himself by insisting that he be filmed heroically crouching down behind a low wall with gunfire in the background as he described for viewers the dangerous action all around. His team were delighted to film him, as right behind the wall in the camera shot were a young Russian couple nonchalantly smoking and chatting as if nothing special were happening.

In short, this was one vivid occasion when the taxpayer got an excellent service from the Government; the Embassy's reporting and analysis were faster and far better than anything else on offer, and this enabled the then Major Government's political reaction to the crisis to be measured and strategic.

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

All of which may well be true. Just don't compel me to pay for it. 

Lying is an interesting phenomenon in politics and diplomacy.

Oscar Wilde had various thoughts on the subject of Lying from a high aesthetic point of view. I can not recall encountering an example of outright lying in my time in the civil service. British people including bureaucrats use all sorts of euphemisms to wriggle out of giving straight answers, but as we all know what they mean (even if foreigners sometimes miss the nuances and term us perfidious) the quality of deliberate blunt dishonest lying is not really there. British politicians can not afford to be caught lying. Or have standards slipped?

My best ever professional lie experience was in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in the mid-1990s. We were having a tetchy bilateral exchange over some visa issues. A few days earlier I as Embassy Political Counsellor had sent a fax to the MFA with our latest position. I turned up for the meeting as arranged to discuss it all.

The Russian head of department and I had some inconclusive exchanges. It dawned on me that he had not read my fax. So I asked him if he had read it. He denied flatly all knowledge of it. I said that that was impossible - it had gone through as usual days before, and he must have seen it. He again denied having seen it.

Then, a miracle. His friendly young diplomat assistant unsteeped in Soviet ways could not resist being helpful and chipped in: "I saw it on your desk this morning!"

Bluster and annoyance. My heart went out to the assistant - the ensuing one-way cattle-class train ride to Siberia would not be much fun.

Yet I misjudged things. The assistant stayed and flourished - last sighted in the President's office. His boss did not care that he had been exposed lying, and that I knew he had lied, and that he knew that I knew he had lied. In post-Soviet  bureaucratic terms it did not matter - lying was a deliberate technique for State Purposes which might work, or it might not - nothing else.

It was even worse in actual Soviet times, of course. On a Glasnost-era visit to Moscow in 1986 with my boss of FCO Planners Pauline Neville-Jones I sat next to an MFA official at lunch and the subject of Romania came up. I said that our Embassy was reporting pitiful conditions for people there as Ceausescu's regime decayed - almost no pressure in the gas system to boil a kettle and one light-bulb per household. "We are not aware of any problems with energy supplies in Romania." So much for sparkling communist conversation.  

I attended a Mediation in London yesterday as an observer, part of the final process of my qualifying as a professional Mediator.

Most Mediations settle the dispute, often saving the parties vast sums of money. Plus unresolved Mediations at least clear the air and can enable the parties quietly to find a settlement a few days or weeks later. In this case the Mediator was terrific: patient, firm, steady and resourceful. And unsuccessful. The parties argued long and hard over a commercial dispute and narrowed the gaps between them, but ultimately even the prospect of avoiding awesome professional fees and the uncertain hassle of an eventual arbitration did not bring them to clinch a settlement. Maybe next week?

Why is diplomatic mediation for significant international disputes relatively rare?

In private mediations (family, commercial, employment and so on) the parties typically have plenty of pride, bluster and stubbornness to deploy. But their own money/interests are at stake. Blunt cost/benefit arguments cut ice.

At the state level leaders have the Responsibility of Office which in fact may be the Irresponsibility of Office, especially where there is little democracy. They park themselves on insane positions of ‘principle’ which cause incalculable damage to their own country and people, yet risk little if any personal downside for them - maybe even cheap populist upside if they rig the media and vaunt their intransigence as the only possible response to the scandalous behaviour of the other side.

My favourite example of how people can always wallow in grotesque disagreements when they want to came in Bosnia in 1997. High Representative Carl Bildt and a swarm of diplomats, myself included, tried to set up the first meetings of the new Bosnian post-Dayton collective Presidency: Carl describes all this and more in his book. A grisly story. BH Presidency members Izetbegovic (Bosniac) and Krajisnik (Serb) were at loggerheads over the symbolism of different venues in and around Sarajevo; Zubak, the Croat member, was happy to appear quite reasonable on this occasion.

Eventually it was agreed that they hold a meeting in the Museum. The three leaders appeared. And started arguing about the seating arrangements for the three of them at a small round table.

Back to primary school geometry. Should the chairs be in the shape of an equilateral triangle (showing they each had equal status), an isosceles triangle with Izetbegovic looking a tad more important at the head, or a scalene triangle (equal but irregular status)?

Or should they just to get on with it and start the post-war nation-building processes their exhausted respective communities needed?

Several hours later they got on with it. Such self-indulgent nonsense already had cost hundreds of thousands of European lives. And short of picking them up, tying them to their chairs and telling them to be nice - and then praying they would be -  there was nothing we could do about it.

The Civil Service takes letters from members of the public seriously. Apart from anything else, they alas exist. Once they have been placed on someone's desk they have to go somewhere, and unless they are simply incomprehensible utter rubbish (a non-trivial proportion by the way, usually involving HM The Queen, MI6 and aliens) this somewhere can not be the bin. If they are filed it would look bad subsequently if there were no record therewith of what action had been taken on the letter. Hence, there should be action. Usually a reply.

My first main encounter with letters from members of the public came in September 1979 when I was sent to the Indonesia Desk immediately on joining the FCO. A tricky job for a new entrant, as there was to be in the coming November a full State Visit to the UK by Indonesia's President Suharto, a leader with an, er, ambiguous human rights record.

As news of the visit emerged various human rights groups started to lobby the British Government either to abandon the visit completely or at least to use it to press hard on numerous human rights cases, particularly those involving East Timor.

These many letters to all sorts of Ministers and other senior people tended to wend their way to my desk in the FCO, where I was tasked to draft replies to them all. Most letters raised the cases of named Indonesian political prisoners and urged the Government to take them up with the President. The then policy was to the effect that we did not plan to raise individual cases such as that of Mr X during such visits, but of course HM Government would use the visit to make known privately to the President our concerns on human rights questions in Indonesia. That formed the substance of my various draft replies.

But one letter, from (if I recall) Amnesty International members the Paton family of Hospital Road, Bury St Edmunds was different. It did not mention any prisoner's name but was written as if it had done - a slip? There was no sense in our asking the Patons for the name of the prisoner and then telling them that we did not raise individual cases anyway. So it was decided that I should send a reply so ingeniously worded as to give the general line but not mention the political prisoner's name, as of course we did not have it. Off went the reply, signed by me.

As luck had it, after the visit Mrs Paton then wrote another letter to the then FCO Permanent Under-Secretary whose name she had spotted on the Guest List for the State Banquet at Buckingham Palace. This new letter did mention the political prisoner whose cause the Patons were championing. That letter too came down the line to me with the request to submit a draft reply to her from the PUS.

We duly submitted a draft, backed by my earlier letter to the Paton family so that the PUS could see the full picture. Imagine my horror when the papers came back from the PUS's office with a peevish note on top saying that the draft reply was too thin; the PUS in particular "was not satisfied with Mr Crawford's first letter [to the Paton family] which in his opinion completely failed to answer the question".

For an FCO new entrant such a missive is a bit like a reticent but eager-to-please vole being hit squarely on the snout by a Zeus with an Attitude testing one of these.

A new more fulsome draft letter, stained with my tears, was submitted and duly issued. But it boiled down to the same point, namely that whereas the case of this specific prisoner had not been mentioned during the State Visit, HMG's wider concerns on human rights in Indonesia of course had been raised.

Somehow my FCO career survived this calamity. And if anyone out there knows how I might contact the Paton family concerned to pass on my belated regards and to describe to them this episode personally, I'd be happy to hear from you: mail@charlescrawford.biz.  

My own near-death experience with Leaks came back in the mid-1980s when I was in the FCO Planning Staff as the official speech-writer for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Part of the job involved checking draft speeches prepared by other FCO Departments, usually with a view to effecting radical improvements in sharpness and style.

On one occasion I wrote a minute (internal memo) recommending that a draft take a much tougher line against Communism as an ideology and for change in Communist Europe. This was the era of Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika, so talk of reform across the communist world was at last in the air.

I subsequently passed a copy of this memo to my distinguished journalist friend the late Nora Beloff, not with a view to her publishing it (she said she wouldn't, and didn't) but simply to show that it was a bafflingly uphill struggle to get the FCO to take a strong public anti-communist line. I saw nothing wrong in this - it seemed like a reasonable use of my professional discretion, as I had seen other senior diplomats showing much more sensitive internal FCO documents to trusted journalists by way of friendly background briefing.

Nora happened to mention to a top Cabinet Office official that she had this paper. This prompted him to make a formal report of an apparent Official Secrets Act breach by me - in the days of the Thatcher government there was not much sympathy for leakers. I was summoned by the Head of Planners David Gore-Booth (later a lively Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and India) and told that this was a grave matter which had had to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Gulp. Would I suffer a grim fate similar to - or even worse than - that of the woman who had been in my new FCO entrants group in 1979, Rhona Ritchie?

After a few anxious weeks I was told to report to the Head of FCO Security Department, Veronica Sutherland (now President of Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge). She told me that the decision had been taken not to prosecute. I said that no doubt a Thatcher government had not relished prosecuting the lonely FCO official wanting to be tough on Communism. I rehearsed the outlines of my powerful and witty (and obviously doomed) defence, based on the argument that the release of the document to Nora had been 'authorised' under the Act, namely by myself as part of what good diplomats actually do all the time to brief journalists. I even gave her some of the FCO top names I planned to call as Defence witnesses on this very subject; how pleased - nay honoured - they would have been to appear in the witness box at the Old Bailey to explain how such things worked in practice and to speak up publicly for a more junior colleague. She opined that that argument should be left to a good lawyer. I mentioned that I was a qualified Barrister. We parted amicably.

No real moral from this story, other than to note that once a cat comes out of your bag it may go anywhere, even if you think it won't and it promises not to.

It can now be revealed. Nora Beloff's fine book 'Tito's Flawed Legacy' published in 1985 described the scale of repression in Yugoslavia under Tito's reputedly benign 'socialist self-management' which was much lauded in Western leftist circles. The Preface says that the book "is likely to displease the top people (though not everybody) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the State Department". I was part of 'not everybody'.

I much later found myself in Lewin's shirt shop in Jermyn Street standing behind the Guilty Man from the Cabinet Office who had reported my alleged breach of the Act. If ever there was a moment to have to hand my poisoned umbrella of the sort used to murder Georgi Markov, this was it. But alas I had left it at home that sunny day.

Before leaving the FCO I asked under FOI and Data Protection procedures for copies of all my records, including those on the security side. Vast piles of brilliant stuff appeared. But the system claimed to have no record at all of any referral to the DPP concerning this incident.

Lies? Papers lost? Did they tell me they were doing it just to make me sweat?

Or was it all ... a dream?  

Lots in the media (see eg here) about the Prosecution decision not to proceed with charges against FCO official Derek Pasquill on leak charges.  

Disclaimer:  I do not know Derek Pasquill. I do not not know what prompted his leaking of the papers concerned, nor how he did it and what he did thereafter at work. Nor do I know about the chain of events which led to the decision to prosecute Derek Pasquill then abruptly to drop the case.

Update, 13 January: To judge by further media reports all this does not look like a successful achievement of an FCO Strategic Priority.

Nevertheless, as someone who once, back in the mists of time, was referred to the DPP on a possible Official Secrets Act charge over an FCO document I shared with a journalist, and who much later endured some significant pain when a personal email I sent to London was leaked by another colleague in a spectacular fashion, I have given some close thought over the years to the morality of leaks.

There are many different sorts of leaks and leakers and complex motivations in play. The Pasquill case looks like a 'hard core' leak, namely an attempt by a civil servant to push internally Confidential and sensitive official documents out into the public sphere with a view to influencing Policy, knowing that if he asked permission to do this it would be refused. An echo of the Clive Ponting case back in 1985, although no doubt distinctions between these two cases could and should be drawn.

Naturally the media noisily proclaim such episodes as 'spectacular victories for press freedom' with the leaker propelled to instant stardom if not beatification.

I wonder. Leakers in this category appear to want to have their cake and eat it: to stay on the team while disregarding the team rules they themselves accepted.

These days civil servants are not exactly Slaves to Policy. The Civil Service in fact has some good procedures for giving an official unhappy with a policy the chance to get his/her concerns heard at a high level. If those procedures were not being respected the official could tip off someone to ask some penetrating FOI questions. Or such an official could decide that enough was enough and resign in a high-profile way: see eg the honourable and not exactly unimpactful resignation of senior FCO Legal Adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst over the legal justification for the Iraq intervention.

Or some sort of synthesis could be imagined: the leaker posts off the pile of documents to his/her favourite journalist and then walks into the office of a senior FCO colleague with a copy of the documents just despatched, describes fully and frankly what he/she has done and explains why, and requests that the necessary disciplinary or other procedures be launched forthwith. 

So there are lots of different ways of dealing with the sharp pangs of professional conscience (which we all have had) in ways which complement good standards of public life and ethics. But let's at least all agree on the simple principle that to sneak out some papers but stay in place on the public payroll hoping that no-one finds you out is scarcely principled. In fact, it is obnoxious. If not creepy.

In this case, The Observer described Pasquill as "an honourable civil servant who stood up for the best liberal values of his country".

A weighty part of the liberal values of this country is a respect for process and professional trust. Many thousands of civil servants honestly accept that discipline every day, even when they have some doubts about what is proposed, and Ministers (and the public) rely on them to do just that. Their self-restraint is what makes practical democracy tick.

So come, o media outlets, tell us. Are they all any less honourable?

If diplomacy is all about Communication, a lot depends on the interpreters.

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski visited the United Kingdom in late 2006. After a good private discussion at No 10 the President and PM Tony Blair faced the usual joint media event. A Polish journalist asked the President if more should be done by the Polish authorities to help Poles who had come to the UK to look for work but had been unsuccessful and were now living in dire circumstances.

President Kaczynski gave a lengthy and solid reply, the gist of which was that most Poles who had come to the UK since Poland joined the European Union had done well and enjoyed a good reputation; that each country, Poland included, had its share of people who did struggle to succeed, some of whom looked for a better life away from their own country; and that Poland should not shirk its responsibilities in this area.

Fair enough, to someone listening in Polish.

Unfortunately the Polish side's official interpreter in the heat of the moment unwisely and arguably wrongly deployed the curious English word 'feckless' to describe Poles who had fallen on hard times. And some of the British media pounced. 

So what, you no doubt wonder, is the best use of the word 'feckless' in rock/pop music? Rudie Can't Fail by The Clash of course scores strongly. But my vote goes to Hope For Us All by Nick Lowe.  Buy them both.

Back in April 1986 I was the FCO Resident Clerk on duty on the night US warplanes attacked a number of targets in Libya.

The then British Government led by Margaret Thatcher of course knew this was coming, having given permission for some of the US aircraft to deploy from bases in the UK. The FCO had set up an emergency unit to try to manage the expected storm of political and other protests round the world; I as Resident Clerk was expected to deal with the public.

I remember stopping by the Emergency Unit to see what was happening, to be told in a tense voice that the aircraft would be rounding Gibraltar en route to Libya in the coming minutes. None of us knew what would happen. Would widespread war break out? Would our friends and colleagues in Embassies round the Arab world be attacked in revenge?

As news of the attacks broke, the FCO switchboard was soon swamped with callers calling to express in vigorous terms their indignation and anger at this turn of events. I spent hours politely thanking them each for their calls and urging them to contact their MPs or otherwise make their concerns known to the Government in a rather more systematic way.

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.

How do we measure that Reagan power-play after two decades? Colonel Gaddafi is still there. Did the bombing (in part aimed at him personally) eventually give him cause to reflect on the wisdom of promoting terrorism, enabling his much later reconciliation with British and European leaders? Did it also help ratchet up the virulent Islamist fundamentalism we now see? Both?

When NATO forces bombed Serbia in 1999 in response to Milosevic's brutality in and around Kosovo the idea of going after Milosevic personally seems to have been rejected. Hundreds of ordinary Serbs were killed and maimed, soldiers and civilians alike. Milosevic and his appalling family scarcely suffered, at that point at least.

Likewise sustained sanctions helped destroy much of Serbian society, indirectly killing more people and doing damage whose costs compound up down the decades. A Milosevicised gangster elite emerged and prospered; their predominance helped bring about the assassination in 2003 of the most European-minded of all recent Balkan leaders, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

Hmm. Diplomacy reaches Limits. Above all the limit of dealing with Bad Leaders who build up enough domestic power to be able with impunity to wreck their own countries and export disorder elsewhere, and who are just not open to any sort of normal fair-minded arguments.

Going after Bad Leaders in the Reagan way may not be popular. But are the alternatives really so much better in the longer run?

The FCO like all British government departments these days emits profusely all manner of Targets, Strategies, Strategic Priorities, Objectives, Road-maps, Performance Indicators and the rest.

Yet amidst all this feverish management-babble designed allegedly to measure and assess Outputs and Outcomes there is very little about one vital and time-consuming job the FCO does, namely promoting British (and European, and Western, and global) democracy by offering honest and accurate process.

This in practice takes numerous forms. Some are obvious enough, such as officials helping Ministers answer Parliamentary Questions (PQs) and letters from the public, or giving evidence themselves to Parliamentary Committees - a time-consuming and nerve-wracking afternoon out, but all part of keeping public life on a reliable footing.

But others are not so obvious. Thus the FCO's financial and 'risk management' systems associated with how it spends its budget and eg its commitment to delivering good public records seem to go way beyond what the private sector would expect in similar respects.

Why? At root it is because British Ministers may be called upon to answer personally in Parliament for every detail. The chances of any given transaction being scrutinised are of course small, unless some or other abuse or mini-scandal has emerged. But the threat that it may happen - putting a Minister on the spot in potentially a ghastly personal way - disciplines the whole government system to an impressive degree.

The pinnacle of all this is Prime Minister's Questions. It has a soap opera quality at times. But those few minutes a week of intense live public scrutiny compel No 10 to compel the whole of government to do its very best to serve up accurate honest summaries in readable and clear English on all the possible issues of the day and many more besides.

This great bloc of work prepared every week also has to be coherent in itself and as far as possible coherent across government departments. This in turn promotes overall official joined-upness on a scale which stuns our EU partners, many of which still seem to operate on the principle that official information is to be hoarded, not shared.

It is hard to think of anything comparable anywhere else. I was in the USA as the Clinton/Lewinski scandal unfolded. As far as I could see months went by without President Clinton answering any significant media or other questions on the subject. He just battened down the hatches to see out the storm.

That worked over there. But imagine the horror of having to get up week after week in the small Chamber of the House of Commons to explain such matters to hundreds of guffawing MPs. No one on earth could survive it.

Our success is not because we the British have smarter DNA. It is because over many decades our government and public processes have evolved to a remarkably high level of probity and sophistication. Among the highest ever attained in human history?

We are not doomed to maintain this success. There are always political and professional temptations to cut corners or be evasive when things go wrong. Facile media cynicism about government is corrosive. The interplay between UK and EU public spending creates stunning and impenetrable procedure, always a good source of trouble - and potential decay.

Maybe above all the drama of sheer technical complexity is fraying official capacities to cope - are too many processes inherited from earlier times simply no longer sensibly do-able by central or even local government at all? 

As things nonetheless stand, oh British public, our country and its authorities do all sorts of fat-headed things. But in avoiding top-level financial corruption and maintaining world-class standards of integrity in public life we have few rivals. Live in countries where these standards do not apply in practice and see how hopeless things can get for the whole society. 

So let's not take PM's Questions for granted. It helps define Civilisation.

Diplomats and the media like to talk a lot about Stability. Stability is good, instability is not.

They maybe have a point. Not much good usually comes out of heavy political instability. Unless it is the overthrow of a bad regime or dictator, in which case it is not instability but ‘people power’.

But what is stability? Most things are stable - until they aren’t. A house being eaten by termites can look fine and imposing until the instant it collapses.

Hard though it is to believe now, back in the early 1980s the West (not least the FCO itself) hailed post-Tito Yugoslavia as a “pillar of stability in the Balkans”. On my first diplomatic posting in Belgrade (1981-84) the paralysis of Yugoslavia’s convoluted ‘socialist self-management’ collective decision-making processes became ever more evident, to me at least. Yet the senior official policy line remained. Yugoslavia was a “pillar of stability” and (more importantly) had to be kept as such. The alternative was unthinkable – and tended to stay very firmly unthought.

As an Embassy Young Turk in these leaden pre-email and pre-fax days I argued about all this inconclusively with the then Ambassador and my other exasperated bosses, plus anyone from London who might listen. They insisted that even if I was right and Yugoslavia faced difficult times, it would “muddle through somehow”.

That familiar formula got me thinking. What did it actually mean? Hence my first FCO rant, in early 1984: “Yugoslavia and the ‘Muddle Through Somehow’ Theory”.

My basic point was as follows. The Muddle Through Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed a number of interesting assumptions:

"… general notions of pragmatism; a certain degree of homely confusion; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through”); … an absence of drastic, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change”.

But, I asserted, MTS as a very concept made sense only if it did not cover everything. World War Two had not exactly been a MTS event. In each case there had to be agreed non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia eg civil war or Soviet military intervention to prop up communist rule) whose likelihood also had to be assessed hard-headedly.

I tried to weigh all this up, and concluded that there was a serious chance of drastic non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia in the years to come as the various republican leaderships diverted attention from the country’s grim economic problems and played the card of mass nationalism. Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint. “One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

These exchanges read rather well now from my point of view – after many tens of thousands of violent deaths, plus billions of international taxpayers’ dollars thrown not very successfully at the problem. Oh, and look: here comes Kosovo again.

Yet it took a while for all that to unfold. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it didn't.

Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured?

And don’t we all face unsettling Non-MTS foreign and maybe not so foreign events as the mass impact of disruptive technologies increases apace - as people get more and more and faster and faster linked up?

To be continued...

Once upon a time the FCO did not have its ‘24/7 Response Centre’. It had a Resident Clerk. Not a single person, but a group of London-based diplomats at First Secretary level who took it in turns to work once a week at night, perched in a room awash in faded glory high in the Foreign Office main building overlooking St James’s Park.

This once was a prestigious and even primitively elegant live-in position. Back in less cost-conscious decades the Resident Clerks had a servant to cook their breakfast and keep their rooms and shoes clean. But as time moved on and telephone communications developed, it became Hard Work.

The Clerks’ tasking was simple: “deal sensibly with anything which turns up”. If the telephones were busy, they did not sleep much and staggered down exhausted to their usual office jobs the following day. If it was a quiet evening they could sleep in a small personal bedroom. Weekends were the worst. The weekend duty officer arrived at the FCO on Friday morning as usual and did not leave the building until 'close of play' on the following Monday. Safety aplenty, not much Health.

I served as Resident Clerk and indeed lived in my own room in the Foreign Office for some two years (1985-86). My finest hour came very early one morning.

At around 2330 hours I was called by an unhappy FCO News Department duty officer to say that the Glasgow Herald had told him in a gloating tone that they were running a copy of a Diplomatic Despatch by Sir James Craig, who had finished a distinguished career as HM Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. The point was that earlier that day an injunction had been issued in London against the New Statesman to block publication of this Confidential document, said to be full of trenchant, heartfelt and pertinent observations by Sir James on the general subject of ‘Arabs’. So the Glasgow Herald had decided to publish this tract in Scotland, confidently expecting to side-step the English courts’ injunction.

I telephoned the then new FCO Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Patrick Wright at his home. I told him that from my barrister training I recalled something about a procedure involving an overnight duty judge who could issue urgent legal orders; maybe that might work in this case? Sir Patrick said “Do your best, my boy” (or words to that effect). I telephoned Sir James and alerted him. He decamped to a friend’s flat to avoid the throng of journalists he (correctly) expected would gather at his house the following morning as the Despatch story broke big.

I then feverishly started trying to track down (with the help of the excellent Number 10 switchboard) numbers for senior English and Scottish Law officers, hoping to explain the problem and see what if anything might be done. This dragged on for a couple of hours. Eventually deep into the night the Herald were startled to receive a formal order from the Scottish courts forbidding printing the Despatch. The early editions had already been printed and carried the text, but later editions had to be changed. The key thing was that thanks to my telephoning which had triggered the Scottish courts’ intervention, the text could not be quoted.

Thus the issue fizzled out to official satisfaction. Freedom of the press had been ruthlessly crushed by the Establishment in general and by me in particular. Hoorah. UK/Saudi relations were not ‘embarrassed’ (this time at least). Phew.

Researching these BG (Before Google) prehistoric events is time-consuming so I have not yet traced a subsequent Daily Telegraph article on this drama which gave the (alas unnamed) FCO Resident Clerk a richly deserved pat on the back.

The point now, of course, is that anything similar leaked to the media today can be out and round the world via the Internet in seconds ("Crikey! FO speaks truth about Europe"). Plus Ambassadors are no longer allowed to send grand and penetrating Valedictory Despatches.

If the Herald team recall this fine episode and want a commemorative drink, I’ll be honoured if they buy me one.