This seat of Britain’s global power is elitist and stuck in the past. It needs to take into account the UK’s new, reduced status
Poor old Foreign Office. The imperial roar has become a squeak. All the wrong pictures adorn its walls, and the wrong attitudes its mindset. And now even its own are turning against it. A new report, aimed at a forthcoming Labour government, demands a complete rebuild. Written by three senior ex-diplomats, including the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill, it dismisses their old department as “somewhat elitist and rooted in the past”, and “like a giant private office for the foreign secretary of the day, responding to the minister’s immediate concerns and ever-changing in-tray”.
The report demands a new office to handle all the country’s overseas affairs, including trade, aid, cultural relations and the climate crisis. It should also modernise its Whitehall palace, one that used to rule an empire and makes Downing Street look like an annexe. When, in 1859, Lord Palmerston rejected Gilbert Scott’s design for a gothic Foreign Office, he demanded instead one that would evoke the spirit of imperial Rome, not “the barbarism of the dark ages”. That is what he got – a building whose very murals were meant to make the world quake.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
