The FCO has a new Permanent Under Secretary (ie top HQ civil servant cheese), namely Simon Fraser.

The Guardian of course gets it wrong:

Although the highly regarded Fraser has worked in the Foreign Office before, it is unusual for the permanent secretary to be recruited from outside the ranks of the diplomatic service.

In fact most of his career has been with the FCO. I know because he was in the group of graduate new entrants which included me, back in 1979. Latterly ( and is often the way these days) he has been on various secondments including to senior positions in Brussels and in Whitehall.

A few years back Simon played a leading role as FCO Director for Strategy and Innovation in the ghastly wholesale reorganisation of the FCO to focus on so-called Strategic Objectives, which devalued classic bilateral diplomacy and so led directly to the fiasco over the Pope's visit earlier this year.

Simon is unfailingly genial and (now) impressively well qualified in all sorts of complex top-level policy areas including world trade. His breadth of professional experience is a good match for leading a diplomatic service which needs rebooting after years of Labour decay (although some might wonder if he is not just a bit too steeped in undiluted Mandelsonism?). He has a very different, livelier personal style which should go down well with Ministers and even the fed up FCO masses.

Plus he has Middle East experience (Baghdad and Damascus) although he is not really a typical FCO 'camel'. Do we dimly recall a long-lost episode when he was moved from a Private Secretary job over his rather too friendly relationship with a Palestinian lady?

Maybe it was someone else.

In any case, that was another country, and we were very young.