Mick Hartley

Ameer Kotecha, former British consul general in Ekaterinburg, on why he’s finally resigned from the Foreign Office:

Nearly five years ago, on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, I was among several thousand officials invited to mark World Afro Day (for those unaware: “a global day of celebration and liberation of Afro hair”) with a panel discussion featuring a director charged with matters of national security.
This week, with war raging in the Middle East and the RAF base in Cyprus under attack, the main news on the Foreign Office internal intranet was about the “New FCDO Capability Framework and self-assessment”, with all staff urged to “Take charge of your development”.

These provide a decent illustration of why, after over a decade, I have resigned from the diplomatic service.

The dysfunction runs deep. In recent discussions about how the Foreign Office could improve productivity with AI, some senior colleagues were more concerned with the need for an environmental impact assessment than for any proposed gains. Colleagues in the Department for International Development (now merged with the Foreign Office) justified to me their refusal to limit working from home to two days a week on the grounds that they didn’t want to work in a “colonial” office building. This is not culture war mudslinging. It illustrates a civil service culture hopelessly distracted by the peripheral, to the neglect of its core mission.

Amorphous “civil service behaviours” have become the guiding principle of recruitment and promotion: it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved, so long as you can spin a good story about it. The civil service has too few officials with science or tech backgrounds, or any private sector experience. Under-performers are usually shuffled sideways or allowed to plod along.

Government lawyers often see only risks, not solutions: when successive foreign secretaries asked me to help get our embassies and consulates serving more British produce to boost exports, I was told it would breach procurement law to favour British suppliers over foreign ones.

And that’s before we even get to the whole Stonewall capture business across the Civil Service….