Days of grandeur and glory are a fading memory

“The shoulders are sagging,” says a former diplomat who led the charge to modernise what is now known as the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Truss’s response has been to try to cheer everyone up. In her first staff meeting, the breezy 46-year-old told civil servants she wanted to restore a sense of fun to the department and promised “more parties”.

“It was completely tone deaf,” one civil servant said.

A diplomat added: “The reference to fun was, of course, just a coded way of saying that she wanted a better relationship with us than we had with Raab. On the other hand, after two years of Boris, a lot of us have got fun fatigue.” A junior diplomat said: “She is telling us what she thinks we want to hear. We don’t want to be a circus, we need to heal.”

The problems at the Foreign Office are deep-rooted. If the London Olympics in 2012 showed British soft power at its peak, since then have come “a run of serious knocks to its international clout”, said Tom Fletcher, a former ambassador who wrote a reforming report in 2016 into the future of the department.

“The Brexit debates gave the impression of a circular firing squad. Trump vandalised the transatlantic relationship, international system and Nato, all pillars of UK foreign policy. And the Johnson government has seen adherence to international law as a negotiating tactic rather than a cornerstone of global credibility,” Fletcher said.

“The cumulative effect is that the UK’s treble A rating for competence is looking shakier.”

Stripped of some European responsibilities and with many overseas roles filled with cheap local hires, the department’s lustre has faded. In Whitehall a churn of ministers, often disengaged from the Foreign Office, has led to a sense that they were treating King Charles Street as a pitstop. When Raab arrived, says one insider, he declared: “I’ll be making the policy here, I will need you for your specialist advice.” It was read by the assembled officials as a warning: “Keep your Remainer views to yourselves.”

In response, there has been an effort among mandarins to play down the impact of Brexit on their working lives, to talk in strained tones about the “new normal”. “It’s like the Fawlty Towers thing — don’t mention the war,” says a civil servant of Brexit.

Budget cuts mean that its overseas resources have been significantly trimmed in recent years.

Some embassies in central Asia — even more strategically important after the Afghanistan evacuation — are down to a handful of UK-based staff. In South America, vital to climate change diplomacy, the numbers have been cut. “I know it’s about saving money,” one highly educated local hire said, “but it’s pretty humiliating”.

“The diplomats sent from London inhabit the upper floor of the embassy, we’re only allowed upstairs under exceptional circumstances. Their rent allowance is greater than my salary but we are the ones doing the follow-up and everybody notices.”

She cites the case of a local mayor who has received British financial help in drawing up a feasibility report for an architectural project. The ambassador was persuaded by his embassy advisers to visit the mayor to cement the bond and have a picture taken. But the mayor postponed the appointment six times — he saw no particular advantage in being publicly associated with Britain.

These brush-offs take their toll. The merit of going abroad is less obvious now to many younger diplomats. In South America, vacancies were advertised on the regional noticeboard in four embassies and found no takers. “No one wants to dance around the world anymore,” says one diplomat, pointing out that this should be the spur for more diversity, more spousal appointments. “Professional diplomatic couples are often more adventurous at least at the beginning of their career trajectory.”

Dominic Raab, oversaw a tumultuous two-year period in which Brexit negotiations were concluded by Johnson’s government, the aid budget was cut and the department was merged with Dfid.

Raab, a former corporate lawyer who holds a black belt in karate, had a sometimes fractious relationship with officials who bristled at his habit of grading their work with a red pen and his willingness to publicly dress them down in meetings.

Some officials characterised Raab’s level of micro-management as forcing them to redraft documents because of a single grammatical or typographical error but allies of the former foreign secretary defended him.

“Dom would make people do the work several times over to get it right,” the Whitehall source said. “Of course people are not going to like it when they are called out in a meeting because the foreign secretary remembers what they wrote in their last meeting better than they do.”

The source complained that Raab had faced a “toxic culture of leaking” from staff unwilling to follow the civil service rules. Raphael Marshall, the whistleblower who gave evidence to a select committee this week, previously leaked details of Raab and the department’s mishandling of the Afghanistan crisis to a Sunday newspaper. The junior civil servant claimed that he was at times the only person dealing with thousands of emails from Afghans seeking to flee Kabul. His evidence painted a picture of a department in disarray, with staff who worked more than eight hours encouraged to go home “despite the urgency of the situation” and officials able to refuse night or weekend shifts to prioritise “work-life balance”.

None of the officials handling the cases “had studied Afghanistan, worked on Afghanistan previously, or had a detailed knowledge of Afghanistan”, Marshall said. He claimed Raab delayed making a decision on evacuations because he wanted an email reformatted.

Raab was moved to the Ministry of Justice after that debacle, marking his departure with a tussle with his successor over the use of the grace-and-favour mansion Chevening.

The merger with Dfid which began on Raab’s watch has proved fraught with difficulties and is still incomplete. Insiders speak of a culture clash between the pragmatic diplomats of the Foreign Office and the do-gooders who work on aid.

Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who heads the select committee which scrutinises aid spending, said it was a “hostile takeover” by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and that Dfid staff were different to other civil servants.

“People that were working in Dfid were doing it because they wanted to work in development. [They] were regarded as world leading specialists in the field.” She said the “brain drain was very real, and very quick” with more than 200 international development experts having already left. Champion is concerned that plans to tie aid spending closer to trade interests risks politicising it.

“The prime minister, when he was foreign secretary, would have been well aware that he had no spending power. He had nice offices, but he didn’t have the cash, but Dfid did have the cash,” she said. “So I can see logically merging those two together would make a lot of sense to him.”

But she said the problem was not having a cabinet minister with a focus on development and that if development spending “is seen as a bargaining chip rather than something that’s being done in good faith for the right reasons, it immediately weakens its value”.

The two departments formally merged at the start of September last year. Two months later came another morale-sapping announcement for staff when the government confirmed it would be abandoning its legally binding commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid and reducing it to 0.5 per cent. This reduction, which will not be fully reversed until 2024 or 2025, led to swingeing cuts to aid spending.

Champion said UN organisations and other countries’ foreign ministries were “furious” with Britain over the cut. “A lot of the schemes that we were funding, we were the main funder. I’ve spoken to various embassies [and they] are really indignant that the assumption seems to be; well, we’ve stepped away so you’ll have to step up your contribution now to cover our costs.”

The merger was announced in June last year, but negotiations over equalising the different pay and benefit packages of the two departments have yet to begin.

Dfid staff were on higher salaries than those in the Foreign Office, receiving an average of £51,000 a year compared with less than £40,000 according to data compiled by the Institute for Government.

Foreign Office staff tended to receive more generous allowances than their ex-Dfid counterparts, from paying for boarding school fees and other expenses for diplomats posted abroad to a few extra thousand pounds for working in London.

The result is that “you have people working the same jobs on different pay”, one union rep said.

Victoria Jones, of the FDA union, which represents senior civil servants, said staff are “voting with their feet and leaving the new department”.

“Our members are frustrated by the pace of change [in] harmonising and levelling up their pay and terms and conditions and are keen for talks to commence so that we can unpick some of the structural inequalities as a result of the merger,” she said.

Several other changes have raised hackles and contributed to low morale. At Raab’s insistence, former Dfid staff are now required to pass ‘developed vetting’ — an in-depth security clearance process including a detailed personal interview, which had not been a requirement when the department was independent.

“People were really unhappy about the developed vetting requirement,” one civil servant said. “It’s really intrusive — they ask you about your sex life and what porn you watch. I didn’t sign up for that.”

Meanwhile, the “reserved” status of the new department means that European citizens who had previously worked for Dfid will eventually have to leave.

In the past few weeks, the long-rumoured news of further cuts have been confirmed. While the spending review called for a 5 per cent cut in department budgets, job losses at the newly merged department will go far deeper, with a 20 per cent cut in the workforce over the next three years.

Despite the uncertainty the cuts are creating among staff, Truss is ploughing ahead with efforts to improve morale. This weekend she hosts foreign and development ministers from the G7 countries and southeast Asia in Liverpool.

After work in the Museum of Liverpool attempting to weave together a democratic answer to China’s Belt and Road network, she is hoping to take the foreign dignitaries to the Cavern Club to hear a Beatles tribute band. A plan to take ministers to tour Anfield, the home of Liverpool football club, has also been mooted.

The meeting will mark Truss’s first significant engagement as foreign secretary on the world stage and a chance to begin fleshing out her policy vision. Her idea is that Britain should take a central role in developing, with allies, the narrow technological edge that democratic states have over China so that Beijing (or any other autocratic state) does not end up setting global standards. That means working with India on 6G, with the US on quantum tech, with the US and Australia on defence, and more tech-savvy diplomats.

While Truss begins to grapple with the demands of her new office, her stock among the Tory faithful is rising fast. Her team’s close attention to her image, particularly on her carefully cultivated Instagram account, has helped to fuel speculation about her leadership ambitions. During a visit to Estonia last month she was photographed in a tank, mirroring an iconic image of Margaret Thatcher. The government’s Flickr account features a steady stream of Truss photographs — far more than any minister other than Boris Johnson.

Truss remains the most popular cabinet minister among Conservative members according to a recent survey by the website Conservative Home. What may make or break her career in King Charles Street, though, is the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The fate of the Iranian-English charity worker has cut through with the British public like no other foreign policy issue. If she can get the woman out of the clutches of the Iranian regime she will have achieved something that her predecessors failed to do: not only rescue a life but restore the confidence of the Foreign Office in its minister. It’s a fiendishly complicated task.

If she fails, her G7 colleagues may be musing in the Cavern Club, she risks being seen as little more than the Minister of Fun.