Agreeing these modest steps could take a year. No one in New York wants to use the “S-word” — for sanctions — and no one wants anything like the 12-year sanctions against Iraq, with their Oil-for-Food Programme, which became the UN’s worst corruption scandal.

Carry on up King Charles Street

THE funniest part of the review of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee is its indignation at being repeatedly shut out of the picture by the mandarins of King Charles Street. But its report makes a serious point.

In withholding from the committee at least two detailed, expensive, internal surveys of its own workings — including that of a £1 million, four-year fraud in Tel Aviv — the FCO showed a “disturbing aversion . . . to proper scrutiny of its activities”, the committee concludes. When the committee did read the reports, it was shocked by some of the findings.

“We conclude that the FCO needs to catch up with the rest of Whitehall by recruiting professionally qualified, experienced people to the top roles in finance, human resources and estate management,” it said.

As Mike Gapes, the Labour chairman, put it: “People who are very good diplomats are not necessarily very good managers, or experienced in finance.” More recruits should be female and from ethnic minorities, the committee said — although it noted that the FCO management agreed.

Andrew MacKinlay, a Labour member, argued that the problem went beyond management to foreign policy itself. “There is a culture in the senior echelons of the Foreign Office which we need to challenge,” he said. “We need to make them understand they are accountable to Parliament” on questions of policy, such as the Sandline arms row or the Iraq war, as well as for accounts.

But the committee is sympathetic on one important point: the “excessive expectations of what the FCO is able to do for people who get into difficulties abroad, including in . . . natural disasters”, it said.

It complimented the Foreign Office on handling Freedom of Information applications quickly, but chided it for turning down more than almost any other department. Yet it sat on the fence on the thorny question of diplomats’ memoirs — warmly urging that confidences not be broken, and that publication should fit tight criteria. Openness, up to a point, was its ambiguous conclusion.