Inside Britain’s failing Foreign Office, why have Ministers lost control?

My essay in UnHerd

A few months ago, UnHerd commissioned me to write an essay on the failure of UK foreign policy as it relates to Russia in particular. This was published two days ago and the text is below. The key points, cutting off dialogue with Russia twelve years ago has proven a dead end, sanctions as the only tool of foreign policy have backfired, our diplomatic capabilities has steadily eroded, and a failing policy sticks, because Ministers are no longer in charge. As a result Ukraine sinks further into the status of a failed rump state, governed by a corrupt and repressive autocrat who no one in western capitals is willing to gainsay, because to do so would be to admit the obvious - that they bet the house on Zelensky and failed. The answer? Ministers need to grow some balls and take a fresh look at why our policy has failed and set out a new approach, re-engaging with Russia in the interests of ending the war and restoring peace and prosperity to Europe.

There is a peculiar double standard that journalists apply to Britain’s elected leaders. While highlighting public discontent with the domestic policies of successive governments, they continue to portray our politicians as titans on the world stage, talking about Britain’s pivotal role in the “Coalition of the Willing”, or insisting that Boris Johnson — though a terrible prime minister — was somehow the second Churchill, whatever his close shave with a Russian missile this week.

Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered moveable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defence secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, cancelled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the grey suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organised the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language centre, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoe-string. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavour.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defence to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. [Although it largely appears a token gesture, overmatched by Israel’s shuttering of Britain’s diplomatic engagement with Palestine.] But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change. To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training centre at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programmes. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic programme of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialogue that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialised, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defence spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defence has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defence production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorised around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilising Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak rouble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritising its state-owned energy and defence monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.