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There is not a great deal I can add to what has already been written about this sorry business but, since I am working on a new course of lectures on ‘Diplomacy and Secret Intelligence’, it has pricked my interest. I shall, therefore, at least say this:

(1) I agree that it is highly likely that the Russian government was, in one way or another, culpable for the nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

(2) It is naïve to expect the fully available proof of this to be revealed since this would probably compromise sources; as also is it naïve to demand that governments remain inert until they have the standard of proof required by a court of law.

(3) I believe it to have been a mistake to retaliate by expelling Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover; first, because they probably had nothing to do with the nerve agent attack, either directly or indirectly; and second, because loss of secret intelligence increases ignorance, ignorance breeds fear, and fear increases the likelihood of impulsive actions.

(3) The Russian intelligence officers were described as ‘undeclared’, as if this were somehow typical of a particularly wicked government. But this is gratuitous language since all intelligence officers based in embassies and consulates pretend to be diplomats or consuls. It is only intelligence officers in diplomatic and consular missions to friendly states who are ‘declared’, and then only discreetly to their counterpart ‘liaison’ intelligence services. In spook-speak, the expelled Russian intelligence officers were simply ‘legals’, using their true names under diplomatic cover just like the British intelligence officers based in Britain’s Moscow embassy. (‘Illegals’ are the rarer breed of intelligence officers who are given false identities and operate as businessmen, journalists, and so on.)

(4) The British government claimed a triumph for its diplomacy in lining up so many other countries to follow it in expelling Russian intelligence officers. But this was almost certainly the product chiefly of the long-established excellent relations between Western intelligence services, with the Foreign Office playing no more than a supporting role. It also further exposed more than one ominous fault line in NATO: Turkey.

John Stuart Mill called the nineteenth century Tory Party in England the ‘stupidest’ party but he would probably not have hesitated for long in abandoning this relativistic statement as too charitable to its modern, Brextremist variant. With apologies to Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, Ken Clarke and a few others, he would probably have called it simply the ‘stupid party’: stupid for thinking Brexit a good idea, stupid for thinking that the elected assembly of a representative democracy is bound by the advisory verdict of a narrow referendum result, and stupid for the manner in which it has subsequently sought to give this result effect.  As for Donald Trump, the great liberal thinker would just have thrown up his hands in despair, while Grenville-Murray – in a sequel to his hilarious satire on politics in provincial France published in 1871 – might easily have taken him as a model for the bovine mayor of Touscrétins.

One of the most serious consequences of the stupidity of these people is the demise of their diplomacy. Arrogance, bluster and wishful thinking are the hall-marks of Stupid Party posturing and they go into overdrive when entering a negotiation on an issue of vast importance and great public interest such as Brexit. The result is poor preparation, over-estimation of the strength of its hand, public refusal to keep its options open, public assurances of rapid success, alienation of the despised ‘experts’ who might have helped it, loss of respect in the eyes of the other party to the negotiation – and collapse of the talks or a humiliating settlement for which the blame is placed on ‘traitors’ at home. This is all so obvious and has been so widely reported that I shall not bore visitors to this site – or depress myself  further – by labouring the evidence. I am writing this now only to draw attention to three recent articles which put a bright spotlight on the problem. The first is a piece in the Guardian  (23 November 2017), reporting the ‘near contempt felt by European leaders at the British government’s management of the Brexit negotiations’ revealed in a document leaked from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. The second is a lengthy, jaw-dropping update in the New York Times (24 November 2017) on the extent to which the Trump administration’s diplomacy-lite secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has eviscerated the US Foreign Service. And the third is a passionate follow-up to this published on 27 November by two former US ambassadors, Nicolas Burns and Ryan C. Crocker, ‘Dismantling the Foreign Service’.

I record here, belatedly, the death in September of my friend, Sir Brian Barder, former British diplomat and author of one of the best books on diplomacy. There were very good obituaries of him in the British press and to these I added a lengthy personal footnote on the University of Leicester website.

This event has moved me – OK, rather mischievously – to offer for adoption a new term in the style of our Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy:

laddish. Hitherto, ‘laddish’ meant only the kind of bad behaviour indulged in by young lads (boys) with weak social restraints. Recently, however, it has acquired a second meaning. It might also now be used to describe any private educational institution designed solely to make money from the award of degrees in diplomacy. It derives from ‘LAD’, the acronym of the late ‘London Academy of Diplomacy’. In stark contrast to the rightly respected Vienna Diplomatic Academy, such an institution is typically headed by an individual with at best only slender familiarity with the profession or the academic subject (and who might well be an agent of influence of a foreign power), and its courses are taught in the main by casually hired employees. Its degrees are validated by a respectable university that should know better, and it obtains superficial glamour from a prestigious address. When its guiding hands are exposed, it tends to disappear in a puff of smoke.

On 22 August (2017) John Kerr published an article in the London Evening Standard that to all intents and purposes was a clear call for the dismissal of Boris Johnson as British foreign secretary. The reasons he offered, which can be read here, come as no surprise to anyone half-way familiar with the appalling reputation Johnson has acquired in his brief spell at the Foreign Office. (I drew attention to his complete absence of diplomatic qualifications a year last June.) But the fact that Lord Kerr is a former permanent under-secretary at the FO and ambassador at Washington and to the EU (now a life peer), lends real weight to the calls for the foreign secretary’s dismissal. Probably taking her cue from this, a week later (29 August), Rachel Sylvester, the respected and well connected political columnist of The Times, published what the Mirror described as a ‘crushing verdict … in a blistering article’ about him: ‘Our foreign secretary is an international joke’, her article was headed. Since The Times has a paywall, Owen Jones handily summarised her piece and added his own flavour to it for the benefit of Guardian readers. The same evening, BBC newsnight picked up the story and gave Johnson’s reputation the right smell by quoting an anonymous official who said that working for the foreign secretary was like having to follow behind a horse and shovel up its shit. In reply, Number 10 gave him the kind of qualified endorsement routinely employed as the prelude to a dismissal, so I’m hoping that his days are finally numbered.

PS (11 November 2017). He’s still there because the prime minister is too weak to sack him and because – to save her party as opposed to her country – she needs to preserve a balance between pro- and anti-Brexit factions in her cabinet (Johnson is the leading Brexiter), irrespective of the qualifications of their senior members for the posts they hold. But the pressure for the dismissal of this arrogant, waffling and thoroughly mendacious Tory opportunist is growing again. See here.