In the superb new biography of Lord Palmerston by James Chambers, it is clear that the majority of Britain’s mid-19th-century ambassadors heartily disapproved of his policy of extending liberal constitutions to anywhere that could sustain them; how those long-dead diplomats would have agreed with their successors’ haughty statement that the creation of an Iraqi democracy today is “naive”.

Similarly, Lord Salisbury saw the Foreign Office as the enemy for its continual pressure to end Britain’s “splendid isolation”. He disliked the process by which diplomats sometimes went native, telling Queen Victoria: “An occasional change of post increases the usefulness of a diplomatist. If he remains too long at one post he falls under special personal influences, or gets mixed up in local quarrels.” Going native is notoriously true of the FCO’s Arabist ambassadors, many of whom signed yesterday’s letter.

Yet before the letter is taken to be indicative of general FCO feeling, we ought to check the small print. There are no former ambassadors to Washington among the signatories, no permanent under-secretaries, only two ambassadors to a great power and an awful lot of third-rankers. We have been treated to the views of our former ambassadors to very minor countries indeed, such as Switzerland, Chad, Cameroon, Colombia and Chile. Oh, and a former Governor of the Falkland Islands. Two of the countries — Luxembourg and the Vatican — are so small they could comfortably be carpeted over in Axminster by the Treasury without anyone noticing the cost. Even if we accept that these scores of CMGs and KCMGs somehow do represent mainstream FCO opinion, what of it? Zara Steiner’s work shows how few of its supposedly first-class brains foresaw the cataclysm of 1914; the appeasement policy of the Thirties was directed from an FCO that agreed with Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax; its top echelons were keen on “dual-flag solutions” at the time of the Falklands.

Finally, and tellingly, the FCO has been the primary British engine for pushing Britain closer and closer towards a European superstate. The best collective noun for any group of British diplomats — let alone 52 of them — is “a cringe”.

Many in the Foreign Office, with their happy memories of reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Oxbridge, cannot come to terms with the very existence of the State of Israel. The reference in their letter to “one-sided and illegal” actions which “cost yet more blood”, for example, is not to Palestinian suicide-bombers but to the policies of President Bush and Ariel Sharon.

In 1948, the Foreign Office, with the same “long experience of the Middle East” that the co-signatories boasted of, advised the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that the Israelis would lose the war of independence and be defeated by the (largely British-trained) Arabs. They estimated that the Arab-Israeli conflict “would be of relatively short duration and would eventually be checked somehow by the UN”. Bevin put the timing at a fortnight, but then, as the High Commissioner in Palestine said, Bevin was “completely surrounded by Arabists”. It is that group whose hands have finally, after half a century, been wrested from Middle East policy. The letter — signed by the former ambassadors to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Bahrain and the UAE — is merely a howl of rage at their present exclusion.

Some of my most depressing moments as a historian have been spent reading FCO minutes. The phrases are nicely turned, the writing is grammatically faultless, the historical allusions learned. Nonetheless, the FCO’s Central Department was irritated in May 1944 that “unnecessary publicity” was being given to Jewish suffering, and stated: “The Allies resent the suggestion that Jews in particular have been more heroic or long- suffering than the other nations of occupied countries.”

We shouldn’t have listened to them then, and, after 60 years of the same kind of stuff, we certainly shouldn’t listen to them now.

The author’s latest book is What Might Have Been

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