Britain’s diplomats are monolingual

Britain’s diplomats are monolingual

The British Prime Minister thinks we’re “sat in the tepid bathwater of mediocrity”. That’s the conclusion of a downtrodden former colleague who I visited recently at the Foreign Office. I thought that sounded a bit unkind. After all, the FCDO (the combined Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) has endured nine foreign secretaries over the past 11 years, all of varying ability and each with their own idiosyncratic sense of what our diploma