The Ministry and the Mandarin. posted by Richard Seymour

Review of John Dickie, The New Mandarins: How British Foreign Policy Works, I B Tauris, 2004.

On the front cover of this book is a recommendation from Lord Geoffrey Howe, the Dead Sheep of Aberavon, describing the contents as "fascinating and well-focused ... sharp as ever." The full sentence from which these words are taken is helpfully supplied on the back. Warned by so many ugly little herpes sores, you might have I thought I'd drop this bloody book like a weekend habit. No chance. For as it turns out, it contains a great deal of useful information. It has the suave and inclusive style of an outsider as well as the imperious and slightly evasive tone of the insider. The revealing anecdotes capture, like no picture, the absurdities of power. The grave and dutiful mandarins obliged to work with egomaniacal and sometimes drunk politicians are never short of irony - whether intended or not. In short, this is a book that cries out to be digested, pumped, squeezed for every item of nutriment in it, then slickly deposited in a public library. By which I mean to suggest, this is really a trawl through a venerable establishment account, seeking information and angles that may be of use to political radicals. Treat it with the customary raised eyebrow and knowing smirk.

Much of the first part of the book is devoted to exploring the author's thesis that a new generation of mandarins has emerged that is sweeping aside old protocols and making foreign policy more responsive to human rights concerns. These 'Young Turks', as he calls them, have been multiplying in the cupboards and wardrobes for some years, only to find their champion in Robin Cook. In 1997, Cook kicked off his time as Foreign Secretary by heralding an 'ethical dimension' to foreign policy, promising to refuse trade with Burma and arms sales to Indonesia. He visited Israel and, instead of taking the usual trip to Yad Vashem, actually laid a wreath at Deir Yassin in memory of the 1948 massacre of Palestinians in that town, which occurred as part of a programme of ethnic cleansing by the founding fathers of Israel.

Regarded as something of a bitch in the manger by diplomats and Foreign Office officials, Cook addressed them all in the Locarno Room and informed them that there would be a decisive shake-up in the way the FO ran its affairs, a meritocratic revolution. He charged the young buck Matthew Gould with setting up a reform group of young officials to modernise the Foreign Office - help it meet the challenges ahead with "the best of the British". If you think this is boring, imagine how bored I feel typing the damned stuff. And so, this reform group set about innovating a series of technical changes which would begin to blast the hierarchy to Hades. The Foresight Report, published in 2000, crystallised these aspirations. Under-performers would be swept out, the Office would learn from its mistakes, equal opportunities would exist for every race and all three genders. Result? Well, it remains the case that the vast majority of place-fillers in the Foreign Office establishment are white men supplied by Oxbridge.

Career Opportunities

This is one of the persistent themes of the book. Mandarins strike one as consistently able, zealous and discrete guardians of the "nation's interest", usually of aristocratic pedigree. Indeed, until 1907, all FO mandarins had to be personally chosen by the Foreign Secretary, have been recommended by a well-placed relative, have a personal income of not less than £400 a year and speak with an accent redolent of the King. Women were prohibited right until after the Second World War. The first married woman to become an Ambassador was Veronica Sutherland, in 1987. And only in very recent years have a substantial number of diplomatic operations been headed by women. Homosexuals were not allowed into the Diplomatic Service until after the Cold War ended (presumably because one might be buggered by a Russian sailor with a spy-chip on the end of his priapus), and it is still considered a disadvantage to those seeking promotion. Similarly, the number of serving officers from ethnic minorities is a mere 5.3%, "unacceptably low" according to the FO.

Now, Dickie has some interview advice for those who wish to become career servants in the FO, especially given that out of about one and a half thousand applicants for a given set of positions, only a tiny number will succeed. For one thing, hopefuls are going to be probed for intellectual background and motivation, and Dickie notes:

"Nowadays, when the interviewer explores the candidate's attitudes, there is a tendency for a smart-Aleck or smart-Alexandra to assume that points can be scored by the intensity of references made to humanitarian issues such as HIV/AIDS, Heavily Indebted Poor Countries and the IMF, and environmental pollution. In fact, a balanced concern and an awareness of the complexities of demands upon national resources are more likely to impress examiners." (pp 31-2).

Or, as the FO might like to put it, "don't take our propaganda too seriously". Indeed, what they are after, as Dickie puts it, is "judgement rather than expertise".

British interests in the world...

The Foreign Office also seeks to hire trained economists, preferrably those with a (neo-liberal) macro-economics background to work for the Diplomatic Service Economists Scheme. A recruit can expect to work from London or the EU, then move on to work in places of hot political interest like the Middle East, where they will convey the wisdom from London to the economists of the government in question. If working in London, they will liaise with the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for International Development. And once established, they may go on to become Ambassadors. One of the ways in which power and ideology reproduce themselves in the upper echelons of the state.

Now, officially, 38% of the Diplomatic Service's activity is commercial work. According to Sir Patrick Wright, however, it is closer to 90%. In recent years, ambassadors have been obliged to share crucial information with businesses considering an investment in the country in which they work. As knowledgable adepts in Arabic and Farsi, for instance, they are in an excellent position to understand nuances that hard-nosed businessmen may not. There are passages in this book that are redolent of a favourite theme of Mark Curtis - namely, the primacy placed on maximising trade advantages and business opportunities through foreign policy institutions including the MoD, FO and the Department for International Development.

The Mandarin as Muse

One of the reasons it is so crucial that the state recruits from the correct layers is that those who rise to fill essential positions in the bureacracy have an enormous amount of power in determining what becomes policy. The permanent and private secretary (PPS) to the Foreign Secretary, for instance, determines to a large extent what papers the minister will get to see, decides what to highlight etc. The PPS "wields enormous power", deciding how good or bad particular conclusions are as they enter the minister's overnight box. Indeed, upon the arrival of a new Foreign Secretary, one of their mandated roles is to supply a child's summary of key foreign policy issues, as in "What you need to know about X". Their role is to guide the minister in his understanding of crucial issue. They will be unimpeachable, insurmountable, capable of dispensing invaluable wisdom at a second's notice - the mandarins are consummate in every way, and the ministers depend upon them. Even where the minister does not initially trust his PPS, he comes to rely upon and form a close bond with him. Dickie provides a number of anecdotes that illustrate these truths graphically. David Owen being passed notes by the invaluable Sir Nicholas Henderson for an impromptu dinner party speech is one example. Another is Murray MacLehose, George Brown's PPS, intervening in a dispute in which Brown - drunk and arrogant - was ordering the pilot of a plane he was on to land in Moscow, disregarding orders from Air Traffic Control. Brown insisted that as he was the minister, he was in charge of the plane and its trajectory and demanded that it land. MacLehose told the pilot he must take no notice of the Minister as his duty was to his own safety and that of the passengers. The pilot, for his part, pointed out that he had no intention of taking any notice of the minister at any rate. It is reassuring that the pilot won that particular power struggle and not MacLehose. The Prime Minister, for his part, relies to a large extent on the meditations of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Formed in 1936, its status was enhanced by Winston Churchill, so that its assessments were sent first and foremost to the Prime Minister and then only to the main cabinet ministers and the Queen. He also receives concise summaries of data from the Cabinet Office, drawn up by officials from MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office and other Whitehall departments. While much of this may seem minute and rather banal detail, the one thing that becomes clear in the book is the institutional dependency of elected leaders. They rely on the servants of the state to provide not merely information but also judgment; ministers rely on mandarins to such an extent that it is impossible to resist their judgements. The mandarins, obviously enough, favour a kind of continuity (they didn't seem to mind Thatcher's revolution too much, however). They reflect the institutional, social and economic circumstances in which they work and their effective role is ensuring that the nation remains a competent player on the global market.

We submit this bill to the house...

Another of Dickie's themes is the declining influence of parliament in Foreign Policy matters. Sir Geoffrey Howe established the Parliamentary Relations Unit in 1983 precisely to combat the distrust between parliament, press and the FO. He may as well have been a dead sheep for all the good it did. In this venue too, front-bench ministers rely heavily on their mandarins to provide written answers to parliamentary questions. For this purpose a stock of information is maintained by mandarins on those backbenchers who are likely to ask difficult questions on important matters of foreign policy, enabling quick responses to be provided by front-bench ministers. Debate is thus foreclosed in glib, prepared, often single-sentence replies that a trained front-bench speaker can issue as if from his own mammoth brain.

The means by which elected ministers may bring pressure to bear on foreign policy issues are "meagre". Question Time can allow issues to be raised, but little usually results from it. MPs may submit early-day motions, but can only speak on them for a maximum of ten minutes, and with little chance of their selected issue reaching debate. Select Committees are a slightly more effective means of scrutiny, but only one - the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges - can actually oblige a Member of Parliament to attend and face questions. The Foreign Affairs Committee represents "the greatest potential for parliamentary influence on foreign policy", but the government is entitled to dismiss its chairmen and members - as in the controversial decision to dismiss such firebrand left-wing mavericks as Donald Anderson and Gwyneth Dunwoody. And, as a body, its role is to probe decisions already made rather than provide a parliamentary input into the formation of policy. It exists to examine the "expenditure, administration and policy" of the FO and associated bodies, not to instruct or proscribe. The information it eventually discovers is often damaging - for instance, its conclusion that the bombing of Serbia had in fact precipitated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovan Albanians; its discovery of "factually inaccurate" responses by Ministers on military export licenses to Zimbabwe; its damning conclusions on the Sandline Affair etc. However, present policy on selling arms to warring or repressive states in, say, Africa, indicate that little has changed. In fact, one of the frustrations of the FAC is the death-like speed of changes supposed to result from the Scott Report. And while it continues to issue stark challenges to the government's marriage of convenience to the Chinese dictatorship, the government blithely continues to do business with Zemin, the Diplomatic Service continues to unearth business opportunities for Britain in the developing coastal areas, and its economists continue to assist the regime on such matters as structural reform etc.

Whispering from the wings

Similarly, while bodies such as Oxfam and Amnesty International provide regular, informed criticisms of UK policy toward Saudi Arabia, for instance, NGOs are either coopted or ignored. By contrast, Dickie notes, certain establishment think-tanks exert considerable influence in the formation and presentation of government policy. The International Institute for Strategic Services, born in 1958 with the loving midwivery of the Rand Corporation, enjoys close relations both with the US State Department and Pentagon, and with the FO and MoD. The Royal United Services Institute, formed in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington, is a beehive of establishment research and thinking, focused on issues surrounding Nato, international security and military procurement. Again, it has close ties with the FO and MoD, and has glowing commendations from our sainted PM: "As a facilitator of the exchange of ideas and information and as an educator of policy makers of the present and future the Institute is second to none". Bless. The Royal Institute of International Affairs has ties to the FO "sustained through corporate membership, which enables members of the Diplomatic Service to attend meetings, and through a grant of £50,000 for its research programmes". Three members of the RIIA council are "ex-ambassadiors - Sir John Appleyard, formerly in China, Sir John Birch, formerly in Hungary, and Richard Tallboys, formerly in Vietnam - and at the top as one of three presidents alongside Lord Robertson and Baroness Williams is the former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd. It has readily responded to Foreign Office suggestions that it host round-table discussions with experts from countries with which the government wishes to improve relations." High-flyers in the Foreign Office are often seconded to the RIIA for a year's research and study.

The Ditchley Foundation is less likely to crop up in news items as an impartial body, because it is not a research outfit, but a club for the promotion of close Anglo-American relations and the high-level exchange of ideas between decision-makers. Its chairman is John Major, while its Director is Sir Nigel Broomsfield, former British Ambassador to Germany. When, in 2000, it began to seriously promote the idea of a common European defense and security policy, "the conference was chaired by former mandarin Sir Michael Alexander with three eminent mandarins from Downing Street - Robert Cooper, William Ehrman and Emyr Jones Parry". Sir Crispin Tickell, former British Ambassador to the UN chaired, and Sir Jeremy Greenstock attended, their exciting conference on the future of the UN.

A rash of such institutions exist which provide excellent cross-fertilisation grounds, and which cement the mandarin's role in the development of ideas which ministers come to rely on in forming policy. The influence of the first two in particular could be felt on Iraq, as the IISS was moved to provide a 'dossier' on Saddam's alleged weapons programmes in 2002, while the RUSI provided excellent sound-bites for the BBC and other news organisations during that war. I don't begin to consider here the impositions and subventions of intelligence and covert operations, because Dickie hasn't much to say on the matter. We'll leave that Lobster magazine.

The backroom boys

Dickie's accounts of internal squabbling between departments, committees and intelligence have been neglected here, since they don't say anything fundamental about how UK foreign policy is formed - but they form a large part of his interest, so expect chunks of that if you manage to pick up this book. However, although this is an exemplary establishment account, its adumbrations of the structure of power and decision-making in Whitehall are of immense import for those seeking to radically change Britain's role in the world. Boiled down to the essentials, the antiwar movement is up against an edifice of undemocratic power, largely operating outside of public scrutiny, without much potential for being impacted by parliament and which defines the agenda, the goals and the framework within which policy is made. Not much can be hoped for from parliament and elected representatives - the only hope resides in the ability of ordinary people to organise and challenge the priorities of an establishment and system that produces such barbarities across the planet.