I resigned from the Foreign Office in protest at what it has become – here are five things that will shock you about the department

I resigned earlier this week from the Foreign Office after 11 years in the diplomatic service. My career took me from postings in London, New York and Hong Kong to heading up the British Consulate in Russia from 2023 to 2025.

For all the adventure, I decided to leave because of mounting frustrations over civil service ways of working, and over the Foreign Office’s skewed priorities. The department is overly focused on the peripheral to the neglect of its core purpose: defending British interests abroad. Recent foreign policy controversies, such as the giveaway of the Chagos Islands, a British overseas territory, seem to me to exemplify this problem.

The Foreign Office was once, and could once again be, a mighty institution, but to be so, we need to reform it. Here are five things about the Foreign Office that might shock you, and which need to change.

1. Corporate ’behaviours’ valued over subject-matter expertise

Recruitment into the diplomatic service and promotion within the Foreign Office is based not on subject-matter expertise or results, but on “civil service behaviours”. It doesn’t matter what you know about Chinese history and culture, the Chinese political system or military capabilities, nor even knowledge of Mandarin: jobs on the China desk and in the British Embassy in Beijing go instead to those who can give the best examples of “changing and improving” or “developing self and others”.

The same applies to all jobs across the Foreign Office. Focusing on these fluffy corporate concepts means we fail to recruit deep subject-matter experts, promote the wrong people and incentivise staff to jump through corporate hoops rather than building deep expertise.

2. Constant job churn

It is rare for officials to spend more than three years in a role, and often it’s even less. My career followed the same trajectory. We have a rotational model of “generalists”, which means after a stint on the Brazil desk, you may go on to the Iran desk, and after a posting at our embassy in Japan, you may go on to a role in Baghdad. This merry-go-round makes little sense and seriously erodes the building of institutional knowledge and country expertise. We should have much more specialisation and keep staff in roles for longer or focus on one region.

3. Bloated HQ bureaucracy

Three-quarters of British officials are based not abroad but in the Foreign Office’s two UK headquarters (London and East Kilbride, Scotland). The result is a bloated centre, with too many officials paper-pushing and speaking to each other, rather than to foreigners. These officials spend ever-increasing amounts of time on corporate processes, responding to Freedom of Information requests or drafting media “lines to take”.

They should be spending their time – as indeed they want to be – thinking deeply about the foreign policy challenges we face today. We should free HQ-based staff from excessive bureaucracy and have a greater proportion of staff based in our embassies overseas, doing what the core of the diplomat’s job is: going out to bat for the UK overseas.

4. Selling off the family silver

Over the years, we have disposed of many of our grandest embassies and ambassadorial residences abroad, selling off the family silver for a quick buck. When the historic British Embassy compound in Bangkok was sold in 2018, we relocated to a modern office tower and British prestige in Thailand took a drumming. Locals – who revered the two-ton bronze statue of Queen Victoria in the grounds as a symbol of fertility and female power – were among the angriest.

When part of our embassy in Tokyo was sold in 2021, the Foreign Office boasted that the money would “contribute towards making our embassies in Tokyo, New Delhi and the wider Indo-Pacific region some of the most modern and environmentally friendly diplomatic buildings in the world”. The storied embassy, dating back to 1872 and situated alongside the moat of the Imperial Palace, was sold in part to pay for solar panels.

These buildings are working offices, not plush homes for ambassadors. They represent the UK in bricks and mortar, and not only enhance our prestige but also massively improve our ability to convene the powerbrokers we need to influence abroad. We should hold on to them.

5. Embassies not being shop windows for Britain

British embassies, high commissions and consulates abroad do not routinely serve British produce when putting on official entertainment. This is an opportunity missed: we should be promoting our national brand, supporting UK farmers and boosting exports by serving everything from Scotch whisky and English wine, to Welsh lamb and Northern Irish beef.

But it also illustrates a deeper problem: we often fail to support British businesses at every opportunity. We also allow ourselves to be tied up in legal knots: when I strived to do more to showcase British brands, government lawyers said it was contrary to public procurement law to favour British suppliers over foreign ones. We need to be confident about putting Britain first, from the small to the big things.