Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered movable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defense secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

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Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, canceled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the gray suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organized the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of  overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language center, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoestring. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavor.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defense to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change.  To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training center at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programs. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic program of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians  do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialog that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialized, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defense spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defense has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defense production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

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Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorized around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilizing Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak ruble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritizing its state-owned energy and defense monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.

Today, a British diplomat being posted to the Middle East will spend almost two years on full pay learning Arabic. That includes close to a year of immersion training in Jordan, with flights and accommodation paid for by the taxpayer. Yet last time I asked the FCDO for data, a full 54% will either fail or not take their exams. To put it crudely, it costs around $300,000 to train one person not to speak Arabic. Around a third of Mandarin and Russian students fail too, wasting millions of pounds even as the department’s budget is slashed.

The problem isn’t new. In 2013, the then-Foreign Secretary William Hague prioritized improving language skills as a tool of diplomatic tradecraft. At a glitzy ceremony, he opened a sparkling new language center, following New Labour’s closure of the Foreign Office Language School in 2007. As Hague put it at the time, diplomacy is the “art of understanding different cultures” — and speaking the local tongue is a crucial first step.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former man in Riyadh, recalls that half of his 1977 intake of 18 fast streamers was put on hard language training. He chose Arabic, to give him options for future promotion. He practiced his trade in Egypt, and having become a “super-Arabist” would go on to become British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. That followed a refresher course in Arabic with a group of Bedouin on the Iraqi border. While he didn’t need to use Arabic at the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh, he could speak with the late King of Saudi Arabia. That’s a level of intimate access that an ambassador without the language would struggle to muster.

Language skills are equally important when dealing with our rivals. Sir Tony Brenton served in Moscow twice in 1994 and in 2004 as ambassador. Knowing Russian meant he could engage with figures like Sergei Ivanov, a key Putin confidante who believes MI6 ruined his KGB career when they exfiltrated Oleg Gordievsky in 1985, and avoided Brits like the plague. At the same time, Sir Tony’s command of Russian set the tone for the embassy. “All the chancery officers had their operational language exams,” he adds, “and were getting out meeting as many people as they could.”

There is evidence, too, that not knowing the local language can cause problems. David Fall, our former ambassador in Vietnam, struggled in Hanoi: he only learned Vietnamese in his fifties. Sir Sherard found the same when he tried to learn Pashto before starting as ambassador to Afghanistan.

The consequences of monolingualism can sometimes veer towards the embarrassing. I once reduced a Thai audience to laughter when the word I thought meant thief turned out to be pubic hair. Politicians have suffered similar humiliations. Sir Sherard recalls Tony Blair inviting the then-French prime minister to Sedgefield in 1998. After a pub lunch, grinning at the assembled media pack, Blair remarked in French of Lionel Jospin: “I have always lusted after you in every position.”

It’s little wonder Hague’s “diplomatic excellence” campaign continued after he left the Foreign Office in 2014. Tom Fletcher, former British ambassador to Lebanon and now at the UN, wrote his Future FCO report in May 2016, arguing that “the FCO should be more exacting in requiring language exams to be passed and linguistic attainment levels maintained”.

While he was Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Simon, now Lord McDonald, insisted on receiving a regular “name and shame” list of ambassadors who hadn’t passed their exams. For a brief period, 80% of Britain’s ambassadors had the required language skills to do their jobs. Overall Foreign Office attainment rose from a dismal 38% to 73%, just 7% shy of an 80% target set by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

But, in 2020, Dominic Raab merged the FCO and the Department for International Development six months into a global pandemic. The organizational change task facing Sir Philip Barton, the then-Permanent Secretary, would have been easier had Britain not followed the US out of Afghanistan in shambolic fashion. The sudden eruption of war in Ukraine hardly helped. Either way, speaking foreign languages dropped off the priority list.

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The newly-acronymed FCDO embraced what Michael Gove would have called an “everyone wins prizes” culture, though few staff felt like winners. The upward trajectory of improvement in language attainment stalled then fell. I recall that Sir Richard Moore, Britain’s spy chief and himself a Turkish speaker, remained vocal on the need for officers to be held to account for passing their language exams after the merger. But his voice was drowned out by the sucking teeth of corporate indecision.

“There’s no real enforcement,” says Jon Benjamin, former director of the Diplomatic Academy and our ex-ambassador to Chile and Mexico. Officers with no pre-existing skills are awarded an overseas job before they undertake language training, and most will go on to complete their posting even if they fail their exams.

Of course, languages are just one requirement for any diplomat. Officers need networking skills, policy nous and the poise to flip into crisis mode at a moment’s notice. But as David Landsman, former ambassador to Albania and Greece, puts it, “one officer who can speak the language is more useful than two who can’t”.

This equally speaks to broader cultural challenges. Increasing numbers of officers cling to the in-house embassy social scene, seldom venturing beyond. Visiting Moscow, shortly before my posting in 2014, I met a colleague who remarked that her Russian had actually become worse since she’d arrived — and she’d been there for two months.

Today, most British ambassadors don’t have the required C2 (master’s degree) standard of language in the country where they work. And ambassadors who fail themselves encourage failure among their staff. Before Russia’s invasion, an officer on full-time Ukrainian study complained that he didn’t want to do in-country training in Kyiv during the winter. The reason? It would be cold and dark. I encouraged him to buy a coat. His ambassador, who couldn’t speak Ukrainian, thought we were being desperately unkind and insisted we make an exception.

There’s other evidence, too, of this enervated culture. At an induction event for graduate-entry fast-streamers, I asked the group to describe a country they’d most enjoyed visiting. Later, a person from HR suggested I ask a more inclusive question next time: some new entrants might not have had a chance to travel overseas before joining the Foreign Office. But surely awareness of countries and cultures is the most inclusion-friendly attribute a diplomat can possess? And if someone is so easily upset over an innocuous question, how would they cope in Moscow when members of Russian intelligence break into their apartment and leave unflushed turds in the toilet?

Just to be clear, there are still exceptional linguists at the Foreign Office. Dame Caroline Wilson, approaching the end of her time in Beijing, is renowned for her Mandarin skills. Nigel Casey, our ambassador in Moscow, clearly speaks excellent Russian.

But I worry that the bathwater of language mediocrity will become more tepid over time. The Foreign Office’s struggle to create Mandarin, Russian and Arabic speakers reflects a wider drop in demand for British students to study languages, a trend the British Academy often highlights. Universities across the UK are abandoning foreign language degree programs in the face of a funding crisis. For their part, young people can’t see a link between studying a language and using a language for careers, because the government and business doesn’t actively promote careers that require language skills.

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Today, only 20% of the Foreign Office yearly fast-stream intake has any language background. But when I visit universities, I meet students passionate about language study. At the University of St Andrews recently, I met two students called Evie and Thomas, who in addition to studying Russian had taken advantage of a study year in Kazakhstan. Thomas, a working-class lad from the North-East, took a trip to Baikonur Cosmodrome to study the effects of dust on the health of local people. Evie recalls trudging to the train station in -20C° and getting a lift from a stranger.

I’d like to see more intrepid people like Evie and Thomas join the diplomatic service. Given they already possess language skills, it would certainly be cheaper than training people from scratch. Ensuring the HR system doesn’t incentivize failure might also help the situation.

But the problem isn’t limited to the Foreign Office. Everywhere you look across government, departments need staff who can speak foreign languages, whether that’s dealing with asylum seekers, providing health or social care to people for whom English isn’t a first language, or listening to tapped phone conversations. There’s a desperate need to strengthen links between universities and government, to build a supply chain of students who want to turn language skills into careers.

The Civil Service Fast Stream has programs for everything from statistics to operational delivery, yet somehow not for languages. Why not set one up? The Government wants to boost graduate apprenticeships and these would offer a route for students to study languages while gaining work experience in a range of government departments. They would also, incidentally, provide a cheaper and less wasteful option than the Foreign Office’s internal language training model.

I worry that a decade from now our most senior ambassadors will be first-posters with no grounding in the country, flopping from meeting to meeting, smiling inanely as their AI interpretation handsets render messages that their prime minister is trying to convey. Meanwhile, in London, Russian and Chinese diplomats will engage in fluent English.

In 2013, when Lord Hague gave diplomatic languages a much-needed shot of adrenaline, the British Academy produced a vital report called “Lost for Words: the Need for Languages in UK Diplomacy and Security”. It said, “if no action is taken, language skills within government will continue to erode until there are neither the skills within government nor enough new linguists coming through the education system to rebuild its capacity and meet the security, defense, and diplomacy requirements of the UK.”

Most of the recommendations in that report were not implemented. Since then, Russia has invested massively in its diplomatic and military capabilities to the extent that they now far outstrip ours. And if you are not worried about that, you should be.

Britain is a country with moderate natural resources and moderate human capital. Where we have excelled is in the strength of our institutions. But the effective delivery of public services depends on the capability, motivation and organisation of public servants, and right now, that can’t consistently be counted on.

So what’s changed? I joined the Civil Service not long before the financial crash when, despite the relatively low salary, good roles attracted smart graduate talent because the work was interesting, often prestigious, and because people had a stake in the ultimate outcome — the successful functioning of the state.

That balance has shifted as years of pay restraint, combined with soaring living expenses, especially in London, have affected the calibre of staff. I know many excellent public servants who have left to triple their wages in the private sector. As a result, the country is getting fewer of our best people and state capability is suffering.

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Troublingly, this isn’t just a question of splashing the cash. Even if there were budget to spare (which there won’t be), rebuilding and remotivating the workforce would be tricky. This is partly because the problem isn’t just a numbers one. It’s an attitude one. Even though the overall size and composition of the Civil Service today does not look that different from when I joined, some of the cultural norms — or “expected behaviours” — are unrecognisable. The most noticeable change is how comfortable younger cohorts have become with publicly expressing ideological views.

The politics of identity is by no means unique to the public sector, but it is uniquely problematic within it. To take one example, it is common to see pronouns attached to the email signatures of public servants. This does not concern me because of what it tells us about those public servants’ views of gender, but because it tells us something about their views. Public servants should be aware that exposing their institutions to accusations of ideological capture, by any type of political persuasion, is damaging.

Stephen Webb, a former Cabinet Office Director, points out that ambiguity around employers’ legal position makes the hierarchy hesitant to challenge any exhibitionist public-sector behaviours, such as displaying pronouns (sometimes incongruously overlapping with the wearing of Palestinian flags and other signalling devices). Or maybe the leadership feels it’s nothing more than passive social compliance and, therefore, not worth the fight. But the effect should not be dismissed. While it’s hard to imagine this kind of signalling leading to any of the outcomes proponents want to see, normalising this sort of ideological signalling has given licence to a growth in cause based, non-work activities in the workplace, which draws focus from core business. Inevitably it also affects productivity.

Such behaviour also blurs the distinction between passive exhibitionism and more overt acts of ideological capture. This could be seen when some civil servants in the Department for Business and Trade decided that, of all the countries to whom we export military equipment, they should threaten to refuse to process export licences to Israel. There is a balance to be struck between engaging sincerely with employees to get the best out of them, and pandering to the latest TikTok cause and its pseudo intellectual underpinnings.

And while the majority of public servants are passionate and professional, their jobs become increasingly difficult when the behaviour of their colleagues degrades their institution’s legitimacy. The Met Police, for example, were already struggling to defend themselves against accusations of permitting antisemitic and intimidating behaviour during the Palestine marches; something which has been made all the harder now one of their most senior advisors has been shown chanting “from the river to the sea”. Either these public servants do not understand that the role of public service is to serve the whole public, or they believe that ideological actions are more worthwhile than their jobs’ substance.

Or perhaps there is another motivating factor. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural science, argued that there is a difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (that is how the process of retrieving memories is prone to bias, meaning the impression we have of our past experiences can be different from how they really happened). Since, for many, the experience of real life now comes second to the way life can be presented online, I would argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a third “self” — the “representing self” — who experiences life in anticipation of how the experience can be represented on social media.

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The decisions people make have long been influenced by what they think those decisions say about them, but social media has magnified this human frailty to such an extent it has changed the way consumer markets function: people participate in activities, choose their holidays and even adjust their worldview very conscious of how this will make them appear to their chosen identity grouping. Studies have shown a link between narcissistic traits and modern Western activism and — sadly — professionalism is no longer a barrier to this type of vanity: it motivates the choices some make in the workplace (as anyone who has had the misfortune to use LinkedIn will know). This, though, should not be the case in public service. If ideological distractions are permitted, it allows employees to show they feel more connected to ideology-based identity groups than to the communities and national community they are employed to serve.

Shifting behaviours and organisational culture is hard, though, particularly when the barriers to sacking employees is high. But the stakes for the country are even higher. We have many exceptional public servants, who feel increasingly let down by the overall effectiveness of their institutions and we risk losing them to better paying work. So we need leaders who will reclaim responsibility for institutional culture from HR departments and will lead by example. Who will promote the talented and be empowered to sack those who are failing. Our public institutions have been allowed to crumble and if an incoming government fails to retain and reward those who can rebuild the legitimacy of these services, those electoral promises won’t be worth the paper they were written on.

As seen and heard from abroad, that essentially means the BBC World Service. Given its impressive figures, any government, not just one facing the uncertainties of Brexit, would see the potential.

The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages to a global audience — across radio, television and internet — now estimated at 426 million a week, with a target of 500 million. But the television audience for English-language programmes has overtaken the English-language radio audience worldwide, and — along with digital — it is growing faster. So far as international broadcasting is concerned, the present and the future are television.

But how well equipped is BBC World Service television — now, after various name changes, officially called BBC World News — to spearhead a UK “soft power” offensive? Having regularly viewed both the BBC and its competition during frequent travels in recent months, I would sadly submit: not very.

With its global reach, its glorious history, and the advantage that the UK is home to the English language, the broadcaster is lauded as unique to “brand” Britain. Times have changed, though, since the BBC World Service (then radio only) ruled the airwaves, and the now 30-year old BBC World Service television looks distinctly unimpressive from abroad.

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So why did the BBC’s global television service lose its edge? A more pertinent question would perhaps be whether it was ever the world-beater it claimed to be in the first place. Since its creation, in 1991, it is probably fair to say that a large part of its reputation was borrowed: it was automatically identified with the BBC World Service radio and allowed to bask, to an extent, in reflected glory.

But there were always big differences between the radio and television services. Where the radio had a long and distinguished history, and was funded until recently by a grand-in-aid from the Foreign Office (while running itself editorially), the TV arm was denied either government or licence-payer funding. It was set up, instead, as a commercial proposition, relying largely on advertising and subscriptions.

Because it uses many of the same correspondents and resources and benefits from the BBC brand, it has generally been treated with the same respect as the BBC World Service radio. But this respect hasn’t always been warranted. There have been questions, for example, about sponsored programming. But it has bred a certain complacency about the competition. For years, BBC World Service TV has been comparing itself favourably with American international broadcasters, such as CNN — which is not hard to do; the bar is not high —  while ignoring the growing appeal of European stations.

From what I’ve seen, the chief competition to the BBC today comes not from the US, but from the two premier European services: France 24 and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. While not a national broadcaster, the Lyon-based Euronews is up there, too.

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All three broadcast internationally in English (often with native English-speaking presenters) as well as in other languages. France 24 has French, Arabic and Spanish, and a combined audience of 61 million; DW has Arabic as well as German, and a combined audience of 135 million (compared with 101 million for BBC World Service television which broadcasts only in English). Both are growing fast.

Taking these stations as the competition, then, BBC World News falls down on a host of comparisons, starting with the absolute basic: timely and worldwide news coverage. BBC World News boasts that it breaks more stories from more places than any other channel. How much of a recommendation that is, however, depends on what those stories are and how they are treated.

Travelling in Italy over Christmas, and in East and Central Europe during the autumn, I found the BBC to be slower on fresh news than the competition, and to have less hard news in the overall output than soft-ish and often repeated features. If I wanted to switch on and know what was happening, France 24 was a much better bet.

A specific example was coverage of the Russia-Ukraine end-of-year prisoner exchange, which on the BBC lagged far behind the actual news and was given little context. US shootings took precedence – even though the service was billed BBC World News Europe.

There was a qualitative difference, too, in the content and tone of features. The ratio of relatively timeless features to news seemed greater, sometimes much greater, on the BBC than on the other channels. A striking proportion of the BBC’s output also seemed too focused on aid projects of various kinds, with a fairly obvious, but unspoken, didactic streak. Even more striking, compared with France24 and DW, was the paucity of features about life in Britain. Both European stations gave substantial glimpses of how life is lived in their countries and looked — sometimes critically — in the mirror.

To be fair, BBC World News did relay some of the crucial parliamentary sessions live, during the Brexit debates. Then again, so did most other international stations, as events in the UK were seen as having global significance. It was a pity, then, that BBC World News did not make a bigger effort to interpret what was happening for the benefit of non-UK viewers.

There are two other points that might be more important for viewers abroad than BBC HQ in London might think. First, quite a few of the presenters and reporters could do with smartening up. Some look downright scruffy, compared with their French and German counterparts. You may object on the grounds that sartorial negligence never harmed anyone. But when you switch from DW to BBC World News and the BBC guy’s shirt is unironed and the trousers don’t fit, I’m sorry, but authority is lost.

Which leaves my final point. The service doesn’t capitalise sufficiently on what could and should be one of the BBC’s greatest strengths vis-a-vis the competition: a wealth of native speakers to choose from. If you watch the BBC abroad, you might expect presenters and reporters to speak comprehensible English. Of course not demanding that everyone should speak the Queen’s English c. 1930, old Etonian or extreme RP. Nor am I saying that English shouldn’t be accented. But the presenter should be understandable. Someone who isn’t shouldn’t be reporting in the name of the BBC.

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Sorry, Auntie, you had it coming

By Robin Aitken

Both France 24 and Deutsche Welle employ fluent English speakers for their English-language channels. So why can’t the BBC, with all the advantages that come from being the home side linguistically, do the same?

Perhaps, then, the top brass should set aside a few hours to view the competition in real time (I wonder if they ever have). That should focus minds.

But tweaks to the programming and a decent wardrobe consultant alone will not do it. These are pretty cosmetic fixes. BBC World Service television is not going to be an effective instrument of “soft power” unless there some rather more fundamental changes.

The first would be to bring World Service radio and televison under the same funding structure and editorial direction, so that it functions as one. At the moment, they are separate, with the radio and its foreign language services funded by the licence-fee and World Service television a commercial entity, funded by advertising and subscription, as it was when it was first set up.

The argument against bringing World Service television in-house was always the cost. But this could be changing. Five years ago, the then Government agreed to a BBC request for more money for its international services — to the tune of £89 million a year — to be spread across World Service radio, television and digital. This would suggest that World Service television is not quite as separate or self-sufficient as it was. With a government that is loosening the purse-strings generally, the time could be ripe for this change.

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The second would be to define the mission of this new unified service more clearly – as entailing the projection of a distinct view, or views, from London. This would have to be handled carefully, as it could encounter staff resistance.

While France 24 and Deutsche Welle are both directly state-owned and their staff well understand that they work for a state broadcaster, I suspect many BBC World Service staff — and I say this as a World Service staff member myself long ago — do not see themselves in the same way. I suspect, too, that they would take a dim view of the idea that the prime purpose of the BBC’s international services was to promote UK “soft power” as a potential threat to their much prized independence.

This could be an obstacle, but it is not insurmountable. The BBC is both aware of, and takes a certain pride in, being seen as a flagship of the UK’s “soft power”. But it regards this as a product of its quality and editorial standards, rather than the reason for its existence. There is no reason to alter this. What could and should be changed is to ensure that those standards are coonsistently upheld across all its international services — radio, television and digital — and that the voice of the BBC abroad is one that comes identifiably from the UK.

International broadcasting, especially television, is highly, and increasingly, competitive. The UK, through the reputation of the BBC World Service had a head start. It cannot afford to rest on its laurels.