Emily Thornberry Institute for Government Lecture - “The Foreign Office under Labour”

Thank you Bronwen for inviting me to speak to you today, and thank you to all our distinguished guests from politics, business, academia, the media, the charity world, and many other fields, for taking the time to participate in this discussion today.

Which I aim to lead for the next 30 minutes or so, after which we can hopefully have around 30 minutes of questions and debate.

And at the outset, let me thank Bronwen, the Institute, its fellows and members for the role that you play in our public life.

At this hugely testing time, both for our country and the world, where examples of good government are so desperately lacking, it is vital that we have an institution like this one analysing and debating how the job of running our countries should best be done. 

It is because of that role the Institute plays that I wanted to make this particular speech here today.

The Armstead-Philip statues

And if I had to sum up what it will be about in an image, it would be the one which I see every day as I walk down Whitehall: the magnificent facade of the Foreign Office building, and the statues by Armstead and Philip that adorn it, each of them depicting in human form the priorities with which the diplomats inside were occupied when the building opened 150 years ago.

Alongside the depiction of Britannia, we see statues for Asia, Africa, Australia, America and Europe, and statues for Agriculture, Manufacture and Commerce.

But we also see statues for Art, Literature and Science. And for Law, Education, and Government.

Statues that represented how the diplomats of the day envisaged their role in the world, one that - in theory, if not in the harsh realities of Britain’s imperial rule - was about championing certain values as well as commercial interests.

And what I want to speak about today is how a Labour government would seek to put values back at the heart of our diplomacy, and by doing so help to transform what Britain is seen to stand for as a country.

Preparing for government

As many of you will know, the Labour Party is currently engaged in a detailed process of Preparing for Government, one that is more essential and urgent than ever given the current situation facing our country.

And as part of that process, we are taking advice from a wide range of experts, whether it’s organisations such as this one, or experienced voices from the civil service or from previous governments.

And one of key piece of advice I’ve received is that the best thing you can do in Opposition is set out in public, in as much detail as you can, the policies you plan to introduce and the principles you plan to apply once you are in power, so it’s not just a case of you preparing for government, but the civil service having a chance to prepare for you.

And I entirely agree with that, because I believe it should always be the case in our democracy – with a permanent civil service – that elected politicians are able to dictate the government’s mission and agenda, but it should be our civil service which decides the structures, mechanisms, and staffing required to deliver those objectives.

And to help them do that today, I want to begin by talking about why I think the Foreign Office needs a change of direction, under new political leadership, and then I’ll set out the principles I would apply if I am in a position to provide that new leadership, which will sit alongside the detailed policies on foreign affairs which the Labour Party has already set out in our manifesto and elsewhere.

Iraq and Austerity

But in analysing the current state of the Foreign Office, I must start by admitting the damage done by the last Labour government in the period after 9/11, when the ceding of policy control from King Charles Street to the Number Ten sofa, followed by the morass in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq, left the Foreign Office stripped of authority and influence, but nevertheless carrying the can for failures beyond their control.

Which makes it all the worse that - when William Hague* arrived in the Foreign Office in 2010 on a mission to restore the authority and control lost during that period - he had to do so while simultaneously having to implement the enormous spending cuts forced on him in the Coalition’s first spending review.

Cuts which not only removed or reduced our presence and our influence in dozens of countries, but which in practically all of them, made us much more reliant on locally-recruited staff than our own career diplomats, leaving us with a profound deficit in terms of the long-term knowledge we hold in Whitehall about the rest of the world.

So even before the events of the last three years, the Foreign Office was suffering two grievous wounds, one from the misguided foreign policies of the post-2001 Blair government, and one from the short-sighted budget cuts of the Osborne Treasury. 

The impact of Brexit

And then came Brexit, the result and aftermath of which has undoubtedly represented a crisis of confidence for the Foreign Office, something made worse immediately afterwards by the decision to carve out large chunks of its capacity to create the Department of International Trade and the Brexit Department.

A mistake on Theresa May’s part which I personally believe was also compounded by putting Boris Johnson in charge of the Foreign Office during that crucial transition period, when – inevitably – his focus, such as it existed, was more on delivering the Brexit result that he had helped to engineer, rather than leading a department focusing on all the other key issues in the world.

So at a time when the Foreign Office was crying out for strong leadership to recover from its crisis of morale, what it got with Boris Johnson actually reinforced the sense of a department which had lost its way.

And there’s another important point about the impact of Brexit. Over the past three years, a diplomatic service that has traditionally enjoyed a reputation overseas for common sense, competence and clear-headed decision-making has found itself representing political masters back in Britain who are doing their best to destroy that reputation in the way they are delivering Brexit.

The muddying of the mission

But even more significant than the crisis of confidence, reputation and leadership that Brexit and Boris induced at the Foreign Office, coming on the back of the shortage of resourcing forced on it due to the post-2010 cuts, we have also seen what I believe is the department’s biggest problem – the total muddying of its mission.

We have seen a perceptible shift to make the promotion of trade, business links and the financial bottom line not just the top priority of Foreign Office staff based here and overseas, but one allowed to over-ride all others, most notably the protection of human rights.

A sense of priorities which I believe – without doubt – has blunted the government’s ability to take a tougher line with Donald Trump over his consistent undermining of the world order, which – from the Philippines and Honduras to Egypt and Bahrain – has made our country dangerously indulgent of authoritarian regimes, and which – worst of all – has made us scandalously complicit in the war in Yemen, and the humanitarian crisis it has caused.

And what I believe the current government has allowed to happen – not just because of Brexit but certainly exacerbated by it – is that the balance we should always strike as a country between promoting our values and promoting our interests has tilted so far in the direction of our interests that our values have become an afterthought.

If we need a reminder why that is such a mistake, we will get one next Monday, which will mark thirty years since the climax of the Iranian Revolution.

An event so shocking to the Foreign Office that the then Foreign Secretary, David Owen, commissioned an internal inquiry to work out they had failed to see it coming.

And one of the key conclusions was that the more the Foreign Office treated the Shah simply as a cash-cow for arms sales, the more it clouded their ability to make an objective assessment of his rule.

As Lord Owen has said: “There could be no better example of an embassy geared to selling British goods than Tehran in the 1970s.”

Yet that exclusive focus on promoting exports meant that our diplomats had their blinkers on when it came to growing public discontent in Iran, and the extent to which the Shah was letting down his own people.

So as well as the principled reasons why we should always promote our values abroad as an end in themselves, there are pragmatic reasons why we should never focus on commercial interests alone. But I fear that is the mistake we are now repeating.

The downgrading of human rights

Look at the drift since 2011, when William Hague rightly declared that there would be “no downgrading of human rights under this government.” Pursuing a foreign policy with a conscience was in our “long-term enlightened national interest”, he said.

But just four years later in 2015, George Osborne’s visit to China earned praise from state-run media, saying he was: “the first Western official in recent years who stressed more the region's business potential instead of finding fault over the human rights issue”.

The following year, in the wake of Brexit, Simon McDonald, Head of the Diplomatic Service, told MPs: “Clearly more resource is devoted…to prosperity than to human rights”, and although human rights is “one of the things we follow”, he said, “it is not one of our top priorities.”

That was followed by Theresa May insisting to reporters accompanying her to the Gulf Cooperation Council in 2016 that it would not serve Britain’s interests to raise questions on human rights on that visit, instead repeating the myth that if we just develop ever-closer links on trade and security with those countries, they will eventually, by some diplomatic osmosis, start pro-actively improving their human rights records.

A pattern repeated last January when after her first visit to China, Theresa May – like George Osborne – was praised by state media for“sidestepping” the issue of human rights, putting the importance of “pragmatic collaboration” with China first, leading to their conclusion that – and I quote...

“For the Prime Minister, the losses outweigh the gains if she appeases the UK media at the cost of the visit’s friendly atmosphere.”

And bringing things up to the present day, while it was certainly not a new idea for Jeremy Hunt to propose that the Foreign Office should throw open its recruitment processes for future ambassadors to Britain’s business leaders – I believe at different times Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all said the same – the current Foreign Secretary’s version of that plan was telling in today’s context, because it spoke of a government that increasingly sees our heads of mission overseas primarily as trade envoys, exporting everything except our British values.

Short-term thinking

And given that is a shift which – as I say – we have seen hugely exacerbated as a result of the government’s panic over Brexit, it also speaks to what I regard as the other and final fundamental problem affecting today’s Foreign Office: the rise of short-termism and the lack of long-term thinking or planning.

Far too much of what the Foreign Office now does is – I believe – driven by the short term news cycle, with horizons that stretch only so far as the next global summit, the next big overseas visit, or even the next edition of the Ten O’Clock News, rather than what the Foreign Office has historically focused on, which is trying to effect fundamental, long-term and lasting change.

Take any one of the many difficult situations facing the Middle East and North Africa right now, and ask yourself either if you understand - or think that Ministers even know - what the long-term strategy is, or the plan over the course of the current Parliament, to achieve peace and stability in Israel and Palestine, in Yemen, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in South Sudan, or elsewhere.

Indeed, it remains shocking to me that not a single one of those countries was even mentioned in the government’s manifesto in 2017, which was supposed to set out their plans for this Parliament, just the second Conservative Party manifesto since the Yom Kippur War to contain no mention of the Middle East.

Rediscovering purpose

So in summary, those are what I regard as the five biggest current problems the Foreign Office as a department faces: the shortage of funding; the crisis of morale; the muddying of its mission; the downgrading of what should be key principles around values and human rights; and the dominance of short-term thinking over long-term strategies.

To adapt a phrase that has become commonplace when discussing Whitehall performance over the last decade, I don’t believe the Foreign Office is no longer “fit for purpose”, I just think that is has lost its purpose, and urgently needs to rediscover it in a world where British leadership is needed more than ever.

Labour’s five principles

To that end, a Labour government would apply five fundamental and related principles to those problems.

- First, we would actively seek both to repair the damage that the Foreign Office has suffered as a result of funding cuts and Brexit, and renew the morale and the mission of its staff, including giving our diplomatic staff the mandate and the resources they need to go out and relentlessly promote both British interests and British values in their host countries. 

- And one of the reasons we will do that relates to our second principle, which is that an incoming Labour government will strive in every situation to strike the right balance between our values and our interests, and never again accept that our values can be sacrificed or set aside in favour of our commercial interests.

- However, and this third principle is equally crucial, while clear-sighted about the promotion of our values when pursuing our goals, we must be equally clear-sighted in dealing with the world as it is now, not as we would wish it to be, and ready to do whatever we can, and deal with whoever it takes, to pursue those goals.

- Which brings me to our fourth principle, which is that we accept that, in most situations, change will take time, so we must set long-term goals in relation to every issue we face, and be both endlessly persistent but also endlessly patient in their pursuit.

- And finally, our fifth principle is that a Labour government will always seek to pursue our goals primarily through multilateral means and our key alliances, because we recognise that we are always stronger as part of a global community than operating alone, but our

interests and values must always come first, and should never be sacrificed for the sake of maintaining those alliances.

So, in the final section of my speech today, let me now talk about some of the practical differences that the application of those principles would mean for Britain’s foreign policy and our leadership of the Foreign Office if a Labour government was in place.

Repairing morale; restoring mission

First, repairing the morale of the Foreign Office and restoring the mission of its staff.

I am of the firm belief that the individuals who seek to work for the diplomatic corps, who are prepared to work anywhere in the world that the Foreign Office demands, even in conditions of great danger or surrounded by great hardship, do so not because it is a job, but because it is a vocation.

How else could we explain the readiness of those individuals to make huge sacrifices and endure huge disruption to their relationships and their family lives, simply because that is what their vocation requires, something I know all too well from my own father’s work for the UN.

And I would be genuinely surprised if a single soul has ever ticked that box applying for the diplomatic specialism because they dreamed of helping to negotiate trade deals with corrupt and autocratic regimes.

Instead, I believe that – for the vast majority – their vocation is driven by a desire to promote worldwide the British values of good governance, democracy, equality, education, the rule of law, human rights, and peace, to promote Britain’s great strengths in art, culture and science, and to fight against poverty, prejudice, exploitation, lawlessness, terrorism, and the forces of war.

And what a Labour government would promise those individuals is that we believe in the same values you signed up for, the values that stare down at you from those statues adorning the Foreign Office building every time you walk past it, and we will give you the resources and the mandate to pursue them, in whatever country you work, or whatever issue or country you manage from Whitehall.

And one practical thing we would do to signal that change would be to reverse the trend we have seen in recent years, where – in our overseas posts – it is now too often only our Ambassadors and Heads of Mission who are expected and encouraged and resourced to engage with key players in the countries where they work.

Instead, I believe every official we employ overseas should have the dedicated time and resources they need to go out and pro-actively build links with local NGOs, faith groups, human rights activists, media, and academics, and feed back to Ministers what we can be doing to support each of the groups in every country who are working to promote the values that we share.

I recall the words of one former ambassador who told the Financial Times a few years ago: “When members of my staff used to come into my office, I’d always look to see whether their shoes were dirty.”

If not, he said, he knew they hadn’t been getting out and meeting enough people. And we need to bring back that spirit.

And the same goes for Foreign Office or other Ministers, when they visit those countries, and must engage with those same civil society groups just as much as they do with representatives of government or business.

Perpetual values; perpetual interests

Which takes me to the second principle: that our values will never again be sacrificed on the altar of our commercial interests.

And let’s be frank – the last Labour government which tried to apply that principle – with Robin Cook at the Foreign Office in 1997 insisting that there had to be an “ethical dimension” to our foreign policy – ultimately failed to strike that balance, or square that circle.

So much so that the “ethical dimension” was very publicly and – for Robin Cook – humiliatingly dropped before the 2001 election, because – as a ‘senior Labour source’ told The Guardian at the time: "It was an embarrassment. We couldn't live up to it. We were always being panned", which they were, especially for maintaining arms sales to governments guilty of gross human rights abuses.

And while I think that whole episode is indicative of some of the frustration people came to feel with the New Labour project – the idea of dropping principles and promises rather than striving ever harder to live up to them – it is also a reminder of how difficult it is to navigate between the pursuit of values and interests, and I am acutely aware how many difficult choices that will entail.

But I think the clearer we make it that the next Labour government will be deadly serious about the pursuit of this goal, and happy to be held to and judged by our delivery of it, the easier it will be for us to have robust conversations with our allies and our trading partners when they are engaged in action which conflicts with our values, and the more likely they will be to take our warnings seriously of the consequences that will flow for our alliances and our trading relationships if that action continues.

So, where Palmerston told the House of Commons in 1848 that – while our alliances change over time – “our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”, I would adapt that mantra, and say instead:

“Both our interests and our values are eternal and perpetual, and those interests and values it is our duty to uphold, both in equal measure.”

And in that light, I would repeat now the commitment I made at the Labour Party Conference in 2017, that our government would undertake a root-and-branch review of our current regulatory regime on arms exports with the express objective of ensuring that arms manufactured in this country can never be used to commit war crimes in other countries or to suppress internal dissent.

And we will also ensure that – even after leaving the EU – we have a proper sanctions regime in place to punish the countries and individuals whose actions we condemn, and indeed think creatively about how we can develop our approach to sanctions to make them as efficient and effective as possible.

Dealing with the world as it is now

But before anyone thinks that second principle risks cutting off our nose to spite our face by being too idealistic and innocent to deal with countries who breach our values, let me move on to our third principle – that we must deal with the world as it is now, not as we wish it could be, and be ready to do whatever we can, and deal with whoever it takes, to pursue those goals.

And yes, that will mean working with leaders we don’t like and governments we don’t agree with, because if we try and operate in some parallel universe where those individuals don’t exist and aren’t in charge of their countries, then we will never achieve change in the real world.

Now some people will look at that and say – if that means dealing with the likes of Iran or Russia on one side, or Saudi Arabia or Turkey on the other – that we will, right from the outset, be compromising the values that we claim will guide Labour’s foreign policy.

But I fundamentally disagree. If we are true to our values, and the objectives that flow from those values, we must accept that – in the world as it is now – that will inevitably mean negotiating and working with people with whom we don’t agree. 

So in conflict situations where our over-riding objective must be the pursuit of peace and the protection of innocent life, we cannot let our distaste for particular governments and our dislike of any proposed solutions put us off the pursuit of that objective.

And nowhere does that debate arise more than on the issue of Israel and Palestine, where over the past year I have been variously attacked by pro-Palestinian groups for my willingness to engage with representatives of the Israeli government, and by pro-Israel groups for my engagement with the Palestinian Authority.

But how on earth does either group think the process of Middle East peace can be moved forward if the only way for a British politician to avoid criticism is to talk to neither side?

Instead, we have to remember Lloyd George’s words to his Middle East envoy, Sir Ronald Storr: “If either side stops complaining, you’ll be dismissed.”

So, unlike the current government, I would be prepared to criticise Erdogan, Bin Salman, and Netanyahu when their actions or words conflict with our values, just as I do Putin, Rouhani, and Abbas.

But to say on principle that we would refuse to deal with any of those leaders or their governments, even when dealing with them is essential for the pursuit of our objectives, would be utterly pointless and self-defeating.

And while some treat foreign policy as a binary choice between the ‘idealism’ of Woodrow Wilson and the ‘realism’ of Henry Kissinger, the truth is that the only way to achieve a principled - but an impactful - foreign policy is to be idealistic about our ends, but realistic about the means to reach them.

Setting long-term goals

And there is a similar trade-off in the fourth principle I outlined: setting long-term goals in relation to every issue we face, and being endlessly persistent and endlessly patient in their pursuit.

Because for every spectacular and sudden change we have seen in our world over the last two centuries – think of the 30th anniversaries we will mark later this year in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest – there are dozens more significant changes that took years or decades to achieve.

And as I said earlier, the kind of long-term thinking and objective-setting to achieve that change is something that the current government and today’s Foreign Office has entirely lost sight of, not just because of the extremely short-term obsession with Brexit and its aftermath, but because of a departmental culture which is unfortunately trying to mirror the rest of Whitehall with its emphasis on the news cycle, and quick wins.

And the old phrase – not seeing the wood for the trees – is particularly apt in this case, because it is my view that – almost alone in Whitehall – the Foreign Office used to see its role as a forester does.

Not like a farmer planting a crop to harvest six months later. But instead planting seeds that will take years or even generations of careful cultivation to come to fruition and change the landscape.

No one year programme can deliver that, nor one desk officer for a particular country, and certainly not one minister, but what each of them can know is that if they are working to clear, long-term objectives of what they want to achieve, and sensible timelines to achieve them, those objectives will be handed down one year, one desk officer, and one minister to the next, and each of them will have made their vital contribution when change finally comes.

And let me give four examples of where that long-term approach would be very different to what we are seeing today from the Foreign Office on some of the biggest issues the world is currently facing.

-----------------

- On the Middle East, rather than hoping against hope that Donald Trump’s son-in-law will come up with a plan nobody has considered in the last 70 years, we might need to take the sensible view that – absent any genuinely constructive attempt to work towards a two-state solution by the current US and Israeli leadership – the primary role the UK government can play over the next few years is to keep the dream of Palestinian statehood alive, work with the international community to alleviate the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinian people, and strive to persuade the Palestinian Authority to stick with the Oslo principles, and remain committed to a two-state solution, until there is new leadership in place – especially in America – prepared to re-start inclusive talks based on those principles.

-----------------

- On China, as we move further into what will come to be defined as the Chinese century, we need Beijing to take an increasingly active leadership role in preserving the rules-based world order; in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals worldwide; in restoring the ambitions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; in tackling the global refugee crisis; and in pursuing a world free from war, persecution and hardship. And yes, as part of that, we would hope to see China itself radically improve its own domestic record on human rights, democracy and freedom of speech and religion.

And if encouraging China towards those objectives seems a very distant prospect at this point, then of course it is, but that is all the more reason to start the incremental pursuit of those goals now, in the same way that China’s largely symbolic signing of the Kyoto Protocol twenty years ago gradually paved the way for the leadership role it undoubtedly shows on Climate Change today.

-----------------------

- And on that issue of climate change, before we reach the point of no return in terms of global temperatures, we must confront the reality that the long-term targets agreed in Paris in 2015 are pointless as long as some major world leaders are happy to ignore them, others shrug their shoulders when asked how they plan to achieve them, and those who are taking serious action to cut their reliance on carbon are left asking themselves: what is the point?

This is a collective problem, a collective failure and there must be a long-term collective solution, which I personally believe lies in taking the progressive American notion of the ‘Green New Deal’, where the fight against climate change becomes a driver of job-creation and economic growth, and turning that concept into something that every country across the world adopts, using the natural advantages their climate and geography grants them in terms of generating clean energy, not just to create jobs and growth domestically, and to cut their carbon emissions, but to develop technology and skills that they can export to others.

And we must align that proposition with the argument that Climate Justice is not just about protecting the world’s poorest people from the environmental damage for which they are least responsible, but also about protecting poorer people in every country including those suffering from fuel poverty, from losing their livelihoods or suffering financial hardship as a result of efforts to tackle emissions.

And the Labour Party would make that Globalisation of the Green New Deal and a Global Approach to Climate Justice a central priority if we come into government.

------------------------

- And as a final example of the need for long-term thinking and planning, let’s take the vexed issue of United Nations reform, a term alternately used by incoming General Secretaries to describe their own personal agendas, and by politicians around the world as a stick with which to beat the UN. What it is not is a term which stands for any concrete, agreed long-term goals about what the UN, its agencies, and its decision-making processes should look like in ten or twenty years’ time, and a plan for how those changes will be delivered. 

So, for example, while we know it would be near impossible in political terms for the current leaders of the P5 on the Security Council to agree short-term changes to the composition of the Council, or reforms to the misuse of veto powers, or additions to its permanent membership to ensure an equal voice for India, and the continents of Africa and South America, it would clearly be more realistic to turn those changes into long-term goals and work gradually to persuade other countries around the world to sign up to them. 

Multilateralism and Consistency

And talking of the UN brings me on to my fifth and final principle: Always seeking to pursue our goals primarily through multilateral means and our key alliances, but at the same time never sacrificing British values and interests for the sake of maintaining those alliances.

I hope the first half of that principle does not need spelling out, other than to say it is a statement of historical fact that we can always exert more power and influence in the pursuit of our objectives when acting in concert with our allies like the United States, and through multilateral bodies like the Commonwealth, NATO, the UN – and indeed the European Union – than we can ever do when acting alone.

And Labour – as the party in government when Britain helped create the UN, when we signed the NATO treaties, and when we agreed landmark agreements on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Climate Change and the Millennium Development Goals – will always remember that lesson.

But let me explain what I mean by the other half of that principle, which is that it has become a disturbing mantra in the last two decades that the maintenance of our strategic alliances – other than with Europe of course – is the consideration allowed to subsume all others.

We can trace that back to Tony Blair and his commitment to George W Bush that he would be “with you, whatever” on Iraq. But bring it back to the present day, and Theresa May doesn’t even have the misguided ideological fixation that Tony Blair had on re-shaping the Middle East, just an instinctive panicked reaction to Brexit, which says this is not the time to lose friends elsewhere, no matter who those friends are or whether they behave as friends should.

How else do we explain the craven indulgence of the human rights abuses committed by President Sisi in Egypt or President Erdogan in Turkey, and the frankly shameful blind eye being turned to the crimes of Crown Prince Bin Salman.

But a Labour government would, I guarantee, be different – simply by applying the principle I have spelt out that above our alliances, above the protection and pursuit of our commercial and security interests, there must be certain values and rules, which we take to be inviolable and that we will apply with consistency.

And the key word there is consistency.

Because for too long, and this was as true of the past Labour government as it is true of this Conservative one, there has been a grave tendency to patronise and punish those nations with whom our trade links and strategic alliances are less important – because their human rights abuses are safe to criticise and their breaches of international law are easy to support UN resolutions against – while the stronger countries have had their own abuses and crimes ignored and indulged. 

Well, kick-down and kiss-up has never been my personal style, and it would not be my policy as Foreign Secretary.

But nor will we ever lurch in the other direction: the point is not to turn the tables, but to treat both sides the same.

So under a Labour Foreign Office, I can also guarantee there will be no indulgence of human rights abuses because they are committed by less powerful countries, or by governments who call themselves ‘socialist’ but who, by their actions, betray every socialist ideal. 

A message to Foreign Office officials

So those would be our five key principles for the Foreign Office, and the five standards I would be happy to be held to and judged by if I was given the honour of becoming Labour’s next Foreign Secretary.

And if I was speaking to any civil servant walking into the Foreign Office today – passing those statues I mentioned at the start of my speech today – what I’d say to them is that I hope, within a year or two of a Labour government coming to power...

- You will feel even prouder to do that job and even more valued than you are now;

- You will certainly feel better resourced and empowered;

- You will know your mission is always to promote our nation’s values as well as our nation’s interests;

- That your job is as much about the objectives of Justice, Good Governance and Human Rights as it is the objective of Trade;

- And that the contribution you will make to the achievement of long-term goals will ensure that you can look back on your career as one that genuinely changed the world.

That is the kind of Foreign Office I hope they would feel inspired to work for, and it is the kind of Foreign Office that I feel personally inspired to lead.

Thank you.