The British Prime Minister thinks we’re “sat in the tepid bathwater of mediocrity”. That’s the conclusion of a downtrodden former colleague who I visited recently at the Foreign Office. I thought that sounded a bit unkind. After all, the FCDO (the combined Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) has endured nine foreign secretaries over the past 11 years, all of varying ability and each with their own idiosyncratic sense of what our diplomats should be doing. Yet on one point my friend was right: language skills.
Today, a British diplomat being posted to the Middle East will spend almost two years on full pay learning Arabic. That includes close to a year of immersion training in Jordan, with flights and accommodation paid for by the taxpayer. Yet last time I asked the FCDO for data, a full 54% will either fail or not take their exams. To put it crudely, it costs around £300,000 to train one person not to speak Arabic. Around a third of Mandarin and Russian students fail too, wasting millions of pounds even as the department’s budget is slashed.
The problem isn’t new. In 2013, the then-Foreign Secretary William Hague prioritised improving language skills as a tool of diplomatic tradecraft. At a glitzy ceremony, he opened a sparkling new language centre, following New Labour’s closure of the Foreign Office Language School in 2007. As Hague put it at the time, diplomacy is the “art of understanding different cultures” — and speaking the local tongue is a crucial first step.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former man in Riyadh, recalls that half of his 1977 intake of 18 fast streamers was put on hard language training. He chose Arabic, to give him options for future promotion. He practised his trade in Egypt, and having become a “super-Arabist” would go on to become British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. That followed a refresher course in Arabic with a group of Bedouin on the Iraqi border. While he didn’t need to use Arabic at the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh, he could speak with the late King of Saudi Arabia. That’s a level of intimate access that an ambassador without the language would struggle to muster.
“To put it crudely, it costs around £300,000 to train one person not to speak Arabic.”
Language skills are equally important when dealing with our rivals. Sir Tony Brenton served in Moscow twice in 1994 and in 2004 as ambassador. Knowing Russian meant he could engage with figures like Sergei Ivanov, a key Putin confidante who believes MI6 ruined his KGB career when they exfiltrated Oleg Gordievsky in 1985, and avoided Brits like the plague. At the same time, Sir Tony’s command of Russian set the tone for the embassy. “All the chancery officers had their operational language exams,” he adds, “and were getting out meeting as many people as they could.”
There is evidence, too, that not knowing the local language can cause problems. David Fall, our former ambassador in Vietnam, struggled in Hanoi: he only learnt Vietnamese in his fifties. Sir Sherard found the same when he tried to learn Pashto before starting as ambassador to Afghanistan.
The consequences of monolingualism can sometimes veer towards the embarrassing. I once reduced a Thai audience to laughter when the word I thought meant thief turned out to be pubic hair. Politicians have suffered similar humiliations. Sir Sherard recalls Tony Blair inviting the then-French prime minister to Sedgefield in 1998. After a pub lunch, grinning at the assembled media pack, Blair remarked in French of Lionel Jospin: “I have always lusted after you in every position.”
It’s little wonder Hague’s “diplomatic excellence” campaign continued after he left the Foreign Office in 2014. Tom Fletcher, former British ambassador to Lebanon and now at the UN, wrote his Future FCO report in May 2016, arguing that “the FCO should be more exacting in requiring language exams to be passed and linguistic attainment levels maintained”.
While he was Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Simon, now Lord McDonald, insisted on receiving a regular “name and shame” list of ambassadors who hadn’t passed their exams. For a brief period, 80% of Britain’s ambassadors had the required language skills to do their jobs. Overall Foreign Office attainment rose from a dismal 38% to 73%, just 7% shy of an 80% target set by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
But, in 2020, Dominic Raab merged the FCO and the Department for International Development six months into a global pandemic. The organisational change task facing Sir Philip Barton, the then-Permanent Secretary, would have been easier had Britain not followed the US out of Afghanistan in shambolic fashion. The sudden eruption of war in Ukraine hardly helped. Either way, speaking foreign languages dropped off the priority list.
The newly-acronymed FCDO embraced what Michael Gove would have called an “everyone wins prizes” culture, though few staff felt like winners. The upward trajectory of improvement in language attainment stalled then fell. I recall that Sir Richard Moore, Britain’s spy chief and himself a Turkish speaker, remained vocal on the need for officers to be held to account for passing their language exams after the merger. But his voice was drowned out by the sucking teeth of corporate indecision.
“There’s no real enforcement,” says Jon Benjamin, former director of the Diplomatic Academy and our ex-ambassador to Chile and Mexico. Officers with no pre-existing skills are awarded an overseas job before they undertake language training, and most will go on to complete their posting even if they fail their exams.
Of course, languages are just one requirement for any diplomat. Officers need networking skills, policy nous and the poise to flip into crisis mode at a moment’s notice. But as David Landsman, former ambassador to Albania and Greece, puts it, “one officer who can speak the language is more useful than two who can’t”.
This equally speaks to broader cultural challenges. Increasing numbers of officers cling to the in-house embassy social scene, seldom venturing beyond. Visiting Moscow, shortly before my posting in 2014, I met a colleague who remarked that her Russian had actually become worse since she’d arrived — and she’d been there for two months.
Today, most British ambassadors don’t have the required C2 (master’s degree) standard of language in the country where they work. And ambassadors who fail themselves encourage failure among their staff. Before Russia’s invasion, an officer on full-time Ukrainian study complained that he didn’t want to do in-country training in Kyiv during the winter. The reason? It would be cold and dark. I encouraged him to buy a coat. His ambassador, who couldn’t speak Ukrainian, thought we were being desperately unkind and insisted we make an exception.
There’s other evidence, too, of this enervated culture. At an induction event for graduate-entry fast-streamers, I asked the group to describe a country they’d most enjoyed visiting. Later, a person from HR suggested I ask a more inclusive question next time: some new entrants might not have had a chance to travel overseas before joining the Foreign Office. But surely awareness of countries and cultures is the most inclusion-friendly attribute a diplomat can possess? And if someone is so easily upset over an innocuous question, how would they cope in Moscow when members of Russian intelligence break into their apartment and leave unflushed turds in the toilet?
Just to be clear, there are still exceptional linguists at the Foreign Office. Dame Caroline Wilson, approaching the end of her time in Beijing, is renowned for her Mandarin skills. Nigel Casey, our ambassador in Moscow, clearly speaks excellent Russian.
But I worry that the bathwater of language mediocrity will become more tepid over time. The Foreign Office’s struggle to create Mandarin, Russian and Arabic speakers reflects a wider drop in demand for British students to study languages, a trend the British Academy often highlights. Universities across the UK are abandoning foreign language degree programmes in the face of a funding crisis. For their part, young people can’t see a link between studying a language and using a language for careers, because the government and business doesn’t actively promote careers that require language skills.
Today, only 20% of the Foreign Office yearly fast-stream intake has any language background. But when I visit universities, I meet students passionate about language study. At the University of St Andrews recently, I met two students called Evie and Thomas, who in addition to studying Russian had taken advantage of a study year in Kazakhstan. Thomas, a working-class lad from the North-East, took a trip to Baikonur Cosmodrome to study the effects of dust on the health of local people. Evie recalls trudging to the train station in -20C° and getting a lift from a stranger.
I’d like to see more intrepid people like Evie and Thomas join the diplomatic service. Given they already possess language skills, it would certainly be cheaper than training people from scratch. Ensuring the HR system doesn’t incentivise failure might also help the situation.
But the problem isn’t limited to the Foreign Office. Everywhere you look across government, departments need staff who can speak foreign languages, whether that’s dealing with asylum seekers, providing health or social care to people for whom English isn’t a first language, or listening to tapped phone conversations. There’s a desperate need to strengthen links between universities and government, to build a supply chain of students who want to turn language skills into careers.
The Civil Service Fast Stream has programmes for everything from statistics to operational delivery, yet somehow not for languages. Why not set one up? The Government wants to boost graduate apprenticeships and these would offer a route for students to study languages while gaining work experience in a range of government departments. They would also, incidentally, provide a cheaper and less wasteful option than the Foreign Office’s internal language training model.
I worry that a decade from now our most senior ambassadors will be first-posters with no grounding in the country, flopping from meeting to meeting, smiling inanely as their AI interpretation handsets render messages that their prime minister is trying to convey. Meanwhile, in London, Russian and Chinese diplomats will engage in fluent English.
In 2013, when Lord Hague gave diplomatic languages a much-needed shot of adrenalin, the British Academy produced a vital report called “Lost for Words: the Need for Languages in UK Diplomacy and Security”. It said, “if no action is taken, language skills within government will continue to erode until there are neither the skills within government nor enough new linguists coming through the education system to rebuild its capacity and meet the security, defence, and diplomacy requirements of the UK.”
Most of the recommendations in that report were not implemented. Since then, Russia has invested massively in its diplomatic and military capabilities to the extent that they now far outstrip ours. And if you are not worried about that, you should be.
