Britain’s foreign ministry has lost its way, critics say

With the engine room of the world empire, the British Foreign Office, Commonwealth and Development Office in recent years has been stripped of its power, prestige and self-esteem.

The British relocation to Afghanistan in Afghanistan in August has made the department look better, according to a source, but critics say the way the FCDO is handling the situation shows serious problems in the Whitehall Rolls-Royce department.

“In terms of domestic issues, the FCDO is at the lowest level of skill and respect than at any other time in the 45 years I have been studying foreign policy in the UK,” said Professor Michael Clarke, former director of the Royal United Services Institute. – tank.

Liz Truss, who replaced Dominic Raab as foreign secretary in September, is tasked with changing things. His political star is rising – then the most popular minister and Conservative freedom fighter, who will elect the next party leader – but it will be a big test.

It is also important that Truss be able to hold on, because this month Boris Johnson gave the foreign secretary and the FCDO new jobs: he will be responsible for EU relations after resigning from Brexit minister Lord David Frost.

Truss is now accused of repairing a relationship that was broken by the bloc and resolving a trade dispute in Northern Ireland after Brexit, which was first established in the Brexit Prime Minister’s agreement.

Clarke said things were difficult. “The FCDO is now on the edge of a very sloping terrain, and it will fall to the ground very quickly in the world only to regain its popularity due to its efficiency and good vision,” he added.

Opponents argue that the FCDO should increase spending and staff if British negotiations are to continue to have an impact, but for many years the government has been struggling.

In a financial review of Chancellor Rishi Sunak in October, FCDO was the only department in Whitehall to reduce its budget by 5 percent by 2024-2025.

This month Truss praised UK ambassadors as “the best” in the world, but a few days later senior officials were told in a FCDO email: “We are planning a 10 percent reduction in all our jobs. March 2025.” James Cleverly, FCDO minister, he later denied that such a circumcision could take place.

UK ambassadors say their ambassadors have money and are much smaller than they should be. Some expensive ambassadors living overseas have been replaced by cheaper workers.

In the meantime, there are significant differences in the 2020 merger of the Office of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Office with the Department of International Development – Johnson’s public project, which served as foreign secretary between 2016 and 2018.

The move was followed by a cut in the UK aid budget abroad, with one ambassador saying the inclusion “came in as a container for cold patients”.

This month’s 25-year-old whistle-blower also said that integration was one of the factors that led Britain to withdraw from Afghanistan, under the auspices of the FCDO.

Raphael Marshall, desk officer at FCDO in London until September, said employees who previously worked in the Department of International Development could not access computers in London because “DfID and FCO IT systems were not integrated”.

He also said in a statement to MPs that during the deportation to Britain, requests for help from thousands of Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban had not been ignored, and that Raab, a former foreign secretary, “did not fully understand what was going on”.

“There has been a real crisis in political leadership, which has not undermined the confidence of the Foreign Office, or its consequences at Whitehall,” said Peter Ricketts, a former senior official at the Foreign Office.

Supervisors describe the King Charles Street department as “desperate” after years of incompetent foreign secretaries.

“The leadership of Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab has been very disappointing to those working in the department,” said one.

Alexandra Hall Hall, a former British ambassador to Georgia and a former Brexit adviser to the UK embassy in Washington, said the post of foreign secretary had not gone to a minister with a long history of global concern for the UK.

“It’s a great reward – one of the highest honors given to politicians for their loyalty, or their silence, or abroad,” he added.

As well as the number of ministers, critics say the suspension of FCDO was also affected by the disruption, at a time when the UK is about to implement its foreign policy on Brexit, “global Britain”.

Brexit is said to have severely disrupted the department: it had no part in the UK-EU negotiations that followed the 2016 referendum on leaving the bloc. “The Foreign Office has obviously had a very difficult five years,” said Ricketts.

In 2017, Sir Ivan Rogers announced his resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU, saying then-Prime Minister Theresa May did not ignore his political warnings. Brexit problems.

“There has been a lot of self-control since then,” said one former ambassador, who left the FCDO two years ago. “If you could not come up with something out of the ordinary, you could say you are a ‘Reminder’ to no one you can trust.”

The ambassadors say they are still grieving over Johnson’s failure to protect Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s former ambassador to the US, who was forced to step down in 2019 following a spate of secrecy that criticizes Donald Trump’s administration.

A FCDO spokesman said: “The foreign secretary has established clear guidelines for FCDO and empowers staff around the world to provide this.

“The department is committed to strengthening the relationship between the economy and security with allies and allies as a way to strengthen the world, to attract more countries to a more liberal democratic system and to build free international cooperation.”