Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was under fire today over the diplomatic shake-up in which dozens of consulates and embassies around the world are be cut to pay for new outposts.

Nine embassies and high commissions and ten diplomatic missions are to close and another 11 are being downgraded as part of a plan to save more than £100 million.

US and Europe bear the brunt of the cuts - Germany is the hardest hit with posts in Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Stuttgart to go - which will take effect from the end of 2006.

The changes will focus efforts on priorities such as combating international terror, the Foreign Office said, and they follow the opening of new British posts in Baghdad, Basra, Kabul and Pyongyang in the past three years others in Libya and Afghanistan since 1997.

"The savings made will help to underpin higher priority work in line with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s strategic priorities, including counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, energy and climate change," the Foreign Office said in a statement.

"Some of the savings will also be redeployed to strategic priority work within certain regions where we are closing posts."

However, Michael Ancram, the Foreign Secretary, said: "The Government must give a far clearer reason for making the dramatic changes it has announced and must show that British commercial interests and the interests of Britons abroad will not be adversely affected."

Missions to the US in Seattle, Miami, Phoenix and Dallas will now all be covered from other areas. Posts in Bordeaux and Lyon in France, Palma and Bilbao in Spain, and Oporto in Portugal will go the same way.

In Australia, Brisbane and Perth will be covered from Sydney, while Auckland in New Zealand will be covered from Wellington. Embassy and High Commission closures are in more far-flung places, with Nassau in the Bahamas the most high-profile casualty.

Officials rejected suggestions that the savings would be used to pay for the UK’s six-month presidency of the G8 group starting next month and EU presidency later next year.

Although British tourists may protest at the closures, the Foreign Office insists that adequate cover can be provided from other locations.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office costs £1.15 billion a year to run and the Treasury is demanding cuts to a budget hugely stretched in recent years by the demands of diplomacy in war zones and the need for extra security.

In some European countries there are consulates in almost every big city. In France, as well as regional centres and at the Channel ports, there is a British presence in Biarritz, Amiens, Lille, Montpellier and Toulouse. Much time is spent helping Britons who get into trouble — losing passports, suffering bereavement or being arrested.

The Government argues that such services are costly and, within the EU, often unnecessary.

In Latin America and Africa, consulates will concentrate on trade and be run on a "hub and spoke" system, supervised from regional embassies.

The changes have been forced partly by rising costs and partly because the relatively small pool of diplomats must be deployed in countries more critical to Britain’s world role.

Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, told officials in a recent internal memo that the changes would bring uncertainty and, for some diplomats, "difficulties and pain".

The cost of protecting missions in Muslim and Third World countries has also risen sharply. The Treasury added £50 million to the Foreign Office budget this year to cover the extra security, but the need to rebuild or relocate embassies for added protection will be a burden for years.

More than a dozen posts have opened in the past five years, including embassies in Libya and East Timor and another in Asmara after Eritrea’s breakaway from Ethiopia, as well as a post in Pristina after the Kosovo war.

In 2001, Britain established its first embassy in North Korea and in Tajikistan, the Kabul embassy was re-opened and missions were set up in Lahore and Bamako, Mali.

In 2002 an embassy was opened in Moldova and the Sierra Leone crisis brought the need for a diplomatic presence in neighbouring Guinea.

The most recent, and some of the most expensive, openings have been the embassy in Baghdad, relocated into the green zone, and consulates in Mosul and Basra.

Furious opposition greeted the last attempt to close British consulates in Europe a decade ago, when a campaign was mounted to keep a diplomatic presence in Venice and Florence. Venice was eventually downgraded.

Today’s announcement is the first diplomatic redeployment linked to a review of international priorities published by the Foreign Office a year ago.

Embassies and high commissions to close:

AFRICA: Maseru, Lesotho; Mbabane, Swaziland; Antananarivo, Madagascar

ASIA-PACIFIC: Port Vila, Vanuatu; Nuku’alofa, Tonga; Dili, East Timor; Tarawa, Kiribati

SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: Ascuncion, Paraguy; Nassau, Bahamas

Consulates and a trade office to close:

ASIA-PACIFIC: Fukuoka, Japan; Vientiane (trade office), Laos

AFRICA: Douala, Cameroon

NORTH AMERICA: Phoenix, Arizona; Dallas, Texas; San Juan, Puerto Rico

EUROPE: Frankfurt, Leipzig and Stuttgart, Germany; Oporto, Portugal

Consulates to be downgraded and staffed by local personnel:

AUSTRALIA: Brisbane and Perth

NEW ZEALAND: Auckland

FRANCE: Bordeaux and Lyon

SPAIN: Palma and Bilbao

GERMANY: Munich and Hamburg

US: Seattle and Miami

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