To celebrate the occasion, LSE Review of Books recommends ten illuminating reads on African politics, society and economics. Click here to buy it for £15.Image Credit: Map of Johannesburg, South Africa ( SEDAC Maps CC 2.0)Ħ June 2016 is the five year anniversary of the launch of the Africa at LSE blog. Naked Diplomacy is published by William Collins (£18.99). As the pages turned, I thought this read increasingly as a new manifesto, and I finished it thinking how unsurprised I would be if Fletcher ended up running the Foreign Office, or the country. This again might seem glib but I think he is serious about wanting more public involvement.
Diplomacy, he insists, is too important to be left to diplomats and he calls on us “citizen diplomats” to engage with it, to wield power. It urges us to be brave, creative, involved and connected. Instead of an argument for the need to rethink how the foreign service is run, Naked Diplomacy becomes a call for us all to reconsider our place in society and in our interconnected world. But in the last section of the book, “we” is us, you and me – and him. This ideal ambassador will be “lobbyist, leader, communicator, pioneer, entrepreneur, activist, campaigner, advocate” and, most importantly, will not be a career diplomat.Īll this is important, even if it is something most of us have been excluded from: when Fletcher spoke of “we”, he was referring to diplomats. In case you don’t know where he is leading, he spells it out by describing a British ambassador of the near future, championing human rights and civil society, looking out for the safety of British citizens, promoting British business. Some of this can sound glib – as when he suggests that “a British embassy can never have too many pictures of David Beckham on the wall” – but it helps to counter-balance the references to Aristotle and others. He writes of hard and soft power, of the effectiveness of nuclear deterrents and of how James Bond helps to promote our national interests. Here he pits the tech-savvy against what he calls the Hapless Henrys, the heirs of Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister. The second section opens with a chapter titled “iDiplomacy” and looks at the transformative effects and possibilities of technology on diplomacy and on government. It ends by listing the essential qualities of a good diplomat: tact, curiosity, courage, and the ability to get on with everyone. The first two draw on Fletcher’s experiences in the Foreign Office, with the first providing an overview of diplomacy, from early Chinese to Samuel Pepys, reporting how the French and Spanish ambassadors in London sought to undermine each other, to the epoch-defining Congress of Vienna, where the “great powers” of the 19th century divided the world into areas of influence and, by implication, of dominance and exploitation. Naked Diplomacy is that idea made flesh, a book of three very different sections. Diplomacy, he insists, is too important to be left to diplomats Having “banged on about how digital will change diplomacy” he went on to suggest that someone write a book about how digital will also change power: “how we can marshal it to confront the threats to our existence. When he left Beirut, and the Foreign Office, in 2015, Fletcher wrote a farewell blog to Lebanon. The message of Naked Diplomacy brings more of it. Anyone who has listened to politicians and diplomats dribbling platitudes on Radio 4’s Today, or BBC1’s Panorama, dodging direct questions and bluffing when a dodge fails, will know how rare that feeling of hope can be. That he is a fast-track civil servant was clear the moment I met him in Beirut three years ago and I came away feeling hopeful.
Before Lebanon he served for four years as political secretary under Blair, Brown and Cameron. He was also one of the youngest ambassadors to be appointed to represent our Britannic Majesty for some 200 years, the first western diplomat to be retweeted by the Iranian president, to have a tweetup with a diva, etc. Fletcher was “our man” in Lebanon from 2011 until last summer, and if you know anything about the intrigues of that country, you will appreciate that he must be extremely skilled in the art of diplomacy.