The Foreign Office

His Majesty’s Foreign Office in right of America is the department of state that conducts the Realm’s relations with the states of the world and with the thirteen other realms of the Crown. Its minister is the Foreign Secretary, who sits in the Cabinet and is, with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary, one of the holders of the four great offices of state.

It is older than the Realm. It was made by the Charter in 1783 out of two offices that were not foreign at all, the colonies’ own agents at Westminster and the King’s department for the colonies, and it kept its English name when the departments created after it were named in plain American. It is the only one of the four great offices that had no article of its own until this one.

It is small. About 6,500 people work in it, a third of them abroad, in a brick building that was put up for it in 1801 and has never been replaced. Its badge is its own name in oxblood capitals between two thin rules, which it shares with the Treasury and for the same reason.

It carries one rule that no other department carries, and a good deal of what is distinctive about it follows from that rule. The King holds fourteen Crowns, and no realm’s ministers may advise him in another’s. The Foreign Secretary advises him on the Realm’s dealings with the world and on nothing else. The Realm’s dealings with the King’s own other realms are not foreign policy and are not the Prime Minister’s either, and the department has had to build machinery for them that nobody else in the world has needed.

Constitutional character

The office of state

The great offices of state are a short list and it has never been amended. What puts an office on it is age: the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the Home Office all existed before the Charter and all kept their English names, and the premiership is itself an office of the Treasury. The Prime Minister article puts it exactly: the great offices of state are the offices whose titles are older than the Realm.

The Foreign Secretary is a Secretary of State and a member of the Cabinet, and ranks in practice behind the Chancellor and ahead of the Home Secretary. The office is held by a politician, with a Permanent Under-Secretary beneath who runs the department and keeps its memory.

A Prime Minister may make a Foreign Secretary in an afternoon, and the Foreign Office is the department where the freedom shows. Premiers have used it to hold a rival, to reward an ally, or to be seen to give a rival something. The Prime Minister article has the rest of the pattern.

The Crown cannot be advised twice

The Realm and thirteen other realms share one King. Each is a separate legal personality with its own ministers, its own Parliament and its own succession, and no realm’s ministers may advise the King in another realm’s affairs. The rule is set out in the Styles and Titles of the Crown and it is the load-bearing wall of the whole arrangement. The Foreign Office is the department that keeps it.

The consequences are practical and constant. The Foreign Secretary cannot negotiate for the King in right of Great Britain, and the British Foreign Secretary cannot negotiate for him in right of America. The two realms may hold different views of a third state and both may be right. The Realm recognised Napoleon as Emperor in 1804 and Great Britain never did, and neither realm was in error, though the shared Crown came very near to breaking over it. For two years of the First Great War the King was at war in his British capacity and neutral in his American one, and nothing broke.

The department’s own account of the rule, given to every new entrant, is that it is a rule about manners before it is a rule about power. A Realm that does not speak for its sister realms is listened to, the department says, when it speaks for itself.

Accredited to the Governor-General

Under Article II.3 of the Charter the Realm’s foreign ministers are accredited to the Governor-General, and the King’s commission to an American ambassador is a commission in right of America. A new ambassador to the Realm presents his letter at Government House, and every arrival is a small constitutional ceremony in which the Foreign Office does all the work and the Governor-General receives all the credit.

The arrangement was made at the Charter to keep the King’s foreign acts out of the hands of any one ministry. It means that the Foreign Secretary advises, the Governor-General receives, and the King, who was in London for most of the year until 2028 and has lived in New Westminster since, has nothing to do with it.

Foreign policy is shared

The Prime Minister signs treaties, attends the summits and holds the direct line to Moscow. The Foreign Secretary does most of the rest, and remains, as the Prime Minister article puts it, a real principal rather than a functionary. The two are in a standing negotiation that neither would call a rivalry and both would call a constraint.

The Foreign Secretary represents the Realm at the Atlantic Treaty Organization in the ordinary way, the Prime Minister attending for summits. The department has a view of every summit, which is that it would have been shorter if it had been held by correspondence.

What it may not do

More of the department’s character is fixed by its prohibitions than by its powers, and there are three that matter.

It may not advise the Crown in another realm’s affairs, which is the rule above and which has no exception and has never been tested to destruction.

It may not issue a passport. That is the Home Office’s, with nationality and entry clearance, and the Foreign Office holds the consular service that serves the people the Home Office has already certified. The department regards the division as correct and its consuls regard it as an accident.

It may not direct the Overseas Service, though the Overseas Service answers to it by statute. The Foreign Secretary signs the warrants, receives the product and is answerable to Parliament for the whole, and does not tell anybody in it what to do on a particular night.

History

The two roots, 1783 to 1790

The Foreign Office was made by the Charter in 1783 by joining two older offices, and neither of them was foreign. The first was the Agency of the Colonies in London: the colonies’ own men at Westminster, who had kept the colonies’ business before the King’s ministers since the 1750s and had become, in the Four-Year War, the only channel by which the colonies could reach the Crown at all. The second was the King’s American Department, the royal office for the colonies, which had administered them from the other side. Between them they held both halves of the same correspondence.

The Charter abolished neither by name. It put them under one Secretary, for the dealings of the new Realm with the rest of the world, and kept for the office the English title that the Realm’s pre-Charter offices kept. John Jay was the first Foreign Secretary, from 1785, under Benjamin Franklin, the first Prime Minister, and held it for five years. He wrote the department’s first rules, which were short, and which included the one it has never changed.

1804

The department’s founding case is a French one. The Realm recognised the French Republic quickly, and in 1804 it recognised Napoleon as Emperor, which Great Britain never did. A French minister was received at New Westminster and presented his letter to the Governor-General under Article II.3. The British minister, who called to protest, was told that the King in right of America was entitled to recognise a government that the King in right of Great Britain had declined to.

The exchange is quoted in every generation of the department’s training. Two realms with one King looked at the same Emperor and decided differently, and neither could instruct the other, and the shared Crown survived it, narrowly. The department has treated the narrowness as the lesson ever since.

Hanover

The King held the Crown of Hanover in right of Hanover, and the union of Hanover with Great Britain ended in 1837. The Realm’s department had no envoy at Hanover and no business there: the Hanoverian Crown was another realm’s, and the sister-realm rule meant that nothing the Realm’s ministers thought about the electorate could be put to the King in either capacity.

The British Foreign Office did have an envoy, and kept a standing instruction to him to say as little as possible and to vote with the majority. The Realm’s department studied the instruction and decided that it was the sister-realm rule in practice: a sovereign who sits in one body in two capacities does best to be quiet in the second. It has never adopted the instruction, because it has never had need of it, and it is the one standing instruction of any foreign ministry that its officials can quote from memory.

The settlement at the border

Edward Everett was Foreign Secretary from 1852 to 1853, in Sam Houston’s ministry, after serving as Premier of Massachusetts Bay and Minister to the Court of St James’s. The brief tenure produced the Mexican settlement, which Everett conducted through special envoys: they negotiated the particular terms while the Foreign Secretary kept the department’s general responsibility. The division of labour kept an envoy’s negotiating authority apart from the Cabinet’s accountability to Parliament, and it remains the department’s model for a delicate negotiation.

It also settled the border by the interests of the people who already lived along it, which the department’s own history lists among its failings and which is set out below. Everett left the department a year later and went on to Government House, where he became the tenth Governor-General.

The quiet war

Charles Francis Adams held the Foreign Office from 1854 to 1858 in the ministry of William H. Seward, and Seward himself held it from 1858 to 1869 under Abraham Lincoln. The department’s reputation for a quiet competence dates from those years. William H. Seward was a better Foreign Secretary than he had been Prime Minister, because a department could be run by a man who kept its relationships in his own hands and a coalition could not.

The department’s war was fought in every foreign capital and consisted of a single sentence. A rising of the polities in the King’s name against the King’s ministers was an internal matter of one realm on which no other had a view. Not one foreign power recognised the rebellion, and the American Civil War is told in its own article; the department’s contribution was that nobody intervened.

Seward’s successor in the Grant ministry, Hamilton Fish, held the office for the whole of the eight years from 1869 and was a restraining hand on a Prime Minister whose instincts were less cautious than his Foreign Secretary’s. He refused to recognise the belligerency of the Cuban insurgents against Spain, on the principle that the Realm had just spent two years insisting on in its own rebellion, and carried the argument against a Prime Minister who was sympathetic. The department’s view of the matter has not changed.

The conference

William M. Evarts held the Foreign Office from 1877 to 1883 in the ministry of James G. Blaine, who treated the hemisphere as his own subject and his Foreign Secretary as the man who carried out what Blaine had already decided. Blaine’s invitations went out in 1882 to an international American conference at New Westminster, which his ministry fell too soon to hold and the next withdrew.

The conference was held in the winter of 1889 to 1890, under Cleveland’s ministry, and Blaine presided over it as a private citizen. It was the department’s first large occasion. A foreign office of about two hundred officials learned from it that a brick house of 1801 could not entertain delegates from eighteen governments, and entertained them anyway. The final act was drafted in the hall of flags and has been quoted there ever since.

Cuba

John Hay held the Foreign Office from 1895 to 1903 in the ministry of William McKinley, and the department managed the war that ended Spanish rule in Cuba in 1898. The Republic of Cuba became independent in 1902 under the Platt system, which reserved a right of intervention to the Realm and provided for a naval lease at Guantánamo Bay.

The department’s own account of the settlement, written in the 1920s and not softened since, is that the legal form presented agreement between states and the political circumstances made the inequality plain. A second occupation followed the election crisis of 1906 and lasted until 1909. The lease has outlived everything else in the settlement, and every Foreign Secretary since Hay has inherited it and none has been able to close it.

Berlin

Robert Lansing held the Foreign Office from 1915 to 1919 in the ministry of Woodrow Wilson. The Realm financed the alliance from 1915 and supplied two million men from 1917, and at the peace it found out what money and manpower buy.

The peace was written at Berlin in 1919 by a directorate of the German Empire and Great Britain, and the Realm was consulted rather than heeded. Wilson had a stroke during the negotiations and the Cabinet governed for months without a premier, and the Foreign Secretary led the delegation in his place, correctly and unmemorably. It came away with a seat in the room and two clauses, one on the hemisphere and one on the League. It argued for lighter reparations and was overruled, the argument being made by officials and not by ministers, and being right. It refused a mandate, having the Philippines already and no appetite for another.

The department calls the conference the worst fortnight of its existence, and has taken one lesson from it, written into its training and into statute within a year. The Realm must never again be invited to sign what it was not allowed to write.

The League years

The Realm sponsored the League of Nations at its foundation in 1920, and the department’s interwar work was done at Geneva by a small mission that grew large. Cordell Hull held the Foreign Office for fifteen years, from 1929 to 1944, in the ministry of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest unbroken tenure in its history.

His first work was the Caribbean. The Roosevelt government declined to repeat the occupation of 1906 and in 1934 negotiated away the Platt right of intervention, though not the lease. His second was neutrality. The Realm stayed out of the war that began in 1939 for two years, and the department’s record of those two years is one of the more careful in its archive: it kept the Realm’s business open with both sides of the Atlantic, and with Portugal, whose Lajes Convention gave the Allies the Azores. The Realm entered in December 1941, after Japan’s attack on Honolulu.

Versailles and San Francisco

The peace of 1945 was made at Versailles and the Realm sat at it as an equal. Dean Acheson took the department in 1945, under Harry S. Truman, and held it for seven years. His first work was the San Francisco Charter of 1945, the Second Covenant of the League, which gave the reconstructed organisation a General Assembly at San Francisco and a Security Council at Kyoto and made the Realm one of five permanent members. The department’s mission at San Francisco is its most steadily staffed.

Brussels and Bonn

The Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded at Brussels in 1949, under Truman, and the Foreign Office negotiated it. Its guarantee is automatic: an armed attack on any member places every member at war without a decision to be taken at the time. The drafting of the clause was the department’s most careful work of the period and it was carried by Acheson against objections from several members that nobody should be bound in advance.

John Foster Dulles held the department from 1952 to 1959 under Dwight D. Eisenhower. His years were the settlement of the postwar order in Europe, the Bonn Technical Agreement of 1955 with the German Empire, and a Cuban policy that the department’s history records without comment: the ministry recognised the Batista government, and the recognition is remembered in Havana and not in New Westminster.

The cold war

The cold war of the department’s twentieth century was not capitalism against communism. It was constitutional government against an authoritarian Russian Republic, with no rival alliance on the other side and nothing symmetrical in the contest. Dean Rusk held the department from 1960 to 1966 under John F. Kennedy, and the Caribbean Missile Crisis of 1962, ended by the tripartite Havana Accord, was its hardest week. Hubert Humphrey held it from 1966 to 1972 under Lyndon B. Johnson, raised private doubts about Indochina and defended the policy in public, and Henry Kissinger followed from 1972 to 1974 in Richard Nixon’s.

The Realm’s best-known treaty of those decades was written in the department’s Treaty Section with Great Britain and the German Empire: the Treaty of Geneva on Celestial Bodies of 1967, which forbids national sovereignty over any celestial body and is the basis of the League’s whole law of outer space.

May Day

The cold war’s sharpest moment came after it was over. After the May Day bombings of 2006, in which 2,158 people were killed, the Realm concluded that the Russian Republic was implicated, moved forces and drafted an ultimatum. The Foreign Office drafted it, and Prime Minister Al Gore refused to act on the attribution. It fell apart within weeks, before any strike, when the trail ran to a third state.

The department wrote the acknowledgement that followed, and wrote it carefully. It was never an apology. The absence of an apology is a standing grievance in Moscow, and the department has never found a form of words that would end it without implying that the ultimatum had been the wrong draft.

The Concert and now

The European Concert was founded at Straßburg in 2027 and is the department’s newest difficulty, treated below. In the same year the Realm bought the Baja Peninsula from Mexico by the Treaty of La Paz, which the Foreign Office negotiated and which it has had no seat on the Cabinet committee that governs since.

The present Foreign Secretary is Margaret Renwick. The department’s most recent work is the loss of the King’s aircraft, which is set out under The present moment below.

Treaties and Parliament

Article XIV.1 of the Charter has said since 1783 that the Crown may make treaties with foreign powers, subject to the approbation of Parliament. For a hundred and thirty-seven years nobody said what approbation was, and the Foreign Office liked it that way. The Realm’s treaties were laid, debated if somebody felt strongly, and ratified. Berlin ended the arrangement.

The department’s lesson from 1919 was procedural. A Realm that had been asked to sign what it was not allowed to write needed a rule that gave Parliament the chance to refuse before the Crown’s word was given, and the Treaties Act 1920 supplied it. It is a short statute and the department regards it as the best thing Berlin produced.

The Commons can refuse and the Lords can delay, and either has done it. The Prime Minister article records that treaties are laid before both Houses and that either may resolve against one, which has happened. The Lords’ power is the interesting one: it is the only place in the Realm’s law where the upper House can make a government wait a season on a point of foreign policy, and the Foreign Office’s lawyers advise that the ninety days are best spent persuading a hundred peers who are, by the Act’s own design, in no hurry.

The last proviso matters as much as the first three. A treaty never changes the law of the Realm by itself. The Prime Minister may sign it and both Houses may approve it, and until Parliament has enacted what it requires the Realm has given its word and not its law. The department’s position, stated in every briefing to a new minister, is that the word is the Foreign Secretary’s and the law is the Commons’, and that a Foreign Secretary who forgets which is which will not be Foreign Secretary long.

The department’s Treaty Section keeps every instrument the Realm has made since 1783, in the original and in the Foreign Office’s own copy, and it is the one part of the building where the temperature is controlled.

The sister realms

The Realms Department

The Realm deals with thirteen other realms of the King: Great Britain, Hanover, Ireland, New Albion, New Wessex, the Union of South Africa, the River Plate, the West Indies Federation, the Philippines, Malaya, Brunswick, Normandy and the Raj. Nothing in the Charter says through which office. There are twelve departments, stable for a century, and a thirteenth office for the sister realms was never going to be made.

The Foreign Office does it. It is the answer that nobody chose and nobody has proposed to change: the Realms Department sits inside the Foreign Office and conducts the Realm’s business with the King’s other governments in a way that is deliberately not foreign policy and is not called by that name. Its head is the Director-General of the Realms, who outranks every other director and who is, in practice, the department’s most diplomatic official.

The High Commissions

The Realm keeps a High Commissioner in twelve of the thirteen, and a Commissioner in Normandy, which is a constituent capacity of the Crown and not a sovereign state. The title is the only practical difference between a High Commission and an embassy, and it is a difference the department insists on: an ambassador is accredited to a foreign head of state, and the sister realms’ head of state is the King.

The most senior post in the Foreign Service is not an embassy. It is the High Commissioner in London, and the Foreign Office regards the post as the most demanding in its gift, because it is a foreign mission to a country that shares the sovereign and is not allowed to take his advice. The Realm’s staff there say that the work is knowing which of the two the British are asking.

Britain keeps its own High Commission at New Westminster. The two High Commissions are the most active diplomatic missions on either side of the Atlantic, and at the time of the Regency they were where the three British privy counsellors swore the Queen.

Between the realms

The realms are not a bloc and the department insists that they are not one. A standing conference of the realms brings the governments together at intervals, with no authority over any of them, because governments advising one Crown need somewhere to compare notes. The Foreign Office supplies its secretariat and has never been able to persuade the realms to give it an agenda.

Each realm advises the King for that realm alone, so each sets its own policy toward a third state. The department keeps a register of every case in which two realms have disagreed in public about a foreign state, which it calls its file of differences. It has about a hundred and sixty entries since the Charter. It does not publish the file, and it regards the two entries of 1804 as the most important.

The King abroad

The King is a visitor to most of his realms and a resident of one. When he travels outside the realms, the visit is a Foreign Office matter: the Foreign Secretary advises on the Realm’s side of it, the Realm’s embassy makes the arrangements, and the Crown in right of America is represented. When he travels to a realm, the visit is not. It is the host realm’s business and the Foreign Office is notified, as every realm’s is, and takes no part.

The rule produces odd results at the edges. A visit to a realm that continues across a border to a foreign state is two visits, in two capacities, advised by two governments, and the King has been known to change aircraft between them.

The office

The departments

The Foreign Office is made of twelve departments. Five are geographical and three are functional, and the others do what no geographical department could.

The Realms is the department described above. The Americas and Mexico handles the hemisphere, including Cuba, Mexico and the Realm’s three standing difficulties there. Europe and the Concert handles the German Empire and the continent. Russia and Eastern Europe is the department that the Foreign Office thinks of as the Foreign Office. Asia and the Pacific and Africa and the Middle East are the two largest by territory and the two smallest by prestige.

The League and the Treaty Organisations handles the League of Nations, the Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Realm’s seat on the Security Council. Consular Affairs serves the people abroad whom the Home Office has already certified as citizens. Protocol arranges what the Realm does when foreigners arrive. The Legal Adviser and the Treaty Section are two separate offices that dislike being confused.

The Overseas Service stands apart under its own director and is described below. It is the twelfth department on the department’s chart and is drawn in a different line.

The Diplomatic Service

About 6,500 people work in the Foreign Office, and about 2,400 of them serve abroad. The Realm keeps about 110 embassies, High Commissions in twelve of its sister realms and a Commissioner in Normandy, and missions to the League at San Francisco and Kyoto, and to the Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Concert, both at Brussels; the Concert mission has been headed since 2027 by Catherine Ainsley, a trade negotiator from the Commonwealth of Cascadia.

Four posts in five are filled by the career service. The rest are political appointments, and the department regards the proportion as roughly right and the quality of the appointments as being the usual variable. The practice dates from the Charter, and so does the old title of the Realm’s representative at the Court of St James’s, Minister, which the department has refused to change to Ambassador in two centuries, on the argument that the sister realm that shares the Crown is owed a courtesy that foreign states are not. The Realm has sent writers, judges and a former child film star who held two embassies and the office of chief of protocol. She is remembered in the department as the best of them.

Who becomes a diplomat

The career service recruits by examination and interview, and it has recruited for two centuries from three universities: Harvard, King’s College and Yale. The department states this as a fact and not a policy. The examination is open to anyone and the interview is held in New Westminster; the people who pass it have in overwhelming proportion been to one of the three, and the department’s own review of its intake, published once, found that the three produced nine in ten of its entrants.

The department regards this as a failing and has said so in print. The Register states it plainly as one of three below.

Passports and consuls

The Foreign Office does not issue passports. The Home Office issues them, with nationality and entry clearance, and the Foreign Office holds the consular service that looks after the people who carry them. Entry clearance abroad is decided at posts that the two departments share, by Home Office officials, in the Foreign Office’s buildings, with the Foreign Office’s staff. The arrangement works, and the lines of authority at a post in the monsoon are the least clear in the government.

The Overseas Service

The Realm’s foreign intelligence service is the Overseas Service, and it stands apart. It is not a department of the Foreign Office. It answers to the Foreign Secretary by statute, and it is the only part of the government that does.

The Home Office conducts no foreign intelligence, and the Signals Directorate’s brief is domestic and civilian. The Ministry of Defence has its own service intelligence and no foreign mandate. The Overseas Service is the place the Realm keeps the rest, and the arrangement that puts it under the Foreign Secretary is older than the Service and rests on one argument: a minister who is answerable for what the Realm says to a foreign state should be answerable for what it does there without saying.

The Foreign Secretary signs the warrants and receives the product. The Foreign Secretary does not direct the Service’s officers, name its agents or know, by the Service’s own rules, where its stations are, and the Foreign Office’s own staff are forbidden by statute from asking. Its size and its budget are not published. Its director has a seat on the Foreign Office board and is the only member who does not attend every meeting.

The statute is not a secret and the Service is not a secret. The Realm has known since the Charter that it has an intelligence service and since the middle of the twentieth century that it is the Overseas Service. Its work is the subject of the Overseas Intelligence Committee of the Commons, which receives its annual report in private and publishes a one-page summary that the Service’s critics call the shortest document in the government.

Relations

Great Britain and the sister realms

The Foreign Office’s relationship with Great Britain is its oldest and its hardest. The two realms share a King and nothing else. Citizenship is separate, the currencies are separate and are both called the pound, and the rule that no realm’s ministers may advise the King in another realm’s affairs means the two governments conduct the most important relationship either has by a procedure designed to prevent them from discussing it.

The department’s settled line is that Britain is the oldest friend, never advised by the Realm and never advising it, and treated with courtesy to the point of reserve. Britain is the senior partner constitutionally and socially; the Realm is the senior partner economically and militarily. The department’s view is that the arrangement is stable because neither partner can say which of the two it is.

The same line governs the other twelve, with the changes of scale. The Raj is a non-aligned empire whose ministers answer to their own Parliament. South Africa is another sovereign Crown realm in the same position. The West Indies Federation is a federation of islands that regards the Realm as the neighbour it cannot choose. The department’s own view is that none of the thirteen is a client and that all of them were, at one time or another, assumed to be.

The German Empire

The German Empire is the Realm’s ally of two wars and the department’s most important relationship after Great Britain. The alliance is the Atlantic Treaty Organization, in which the Empire is the largest continental contributor, and it is the League, where the Empire holds a permanent seat at Kyoto. It is also, since 2027, the Concert, of which the Empire is with France the principal engine and constraint.

The department’s line is a standing agreement to disagree in public and never in the League. The two governments differ on reparations, the Concert’s competences and the Empire’s Mitteleuropa, and they have never differed in a vote at Kyoto. The Foreign Office regards the agreement as the keystone of the Atlantic order and has never seen it written down.

The Russian Republic

Russia is the state the department is organised around: the Russian Republic until October 2028, and since 25 October the Russian Empire, which the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, recognised the night it was proclaimed. The Republic was the excluded pole against which the Allied order was built, an authoritarian republic that held no alliances, never found a bloc of its own, and kept the Realm’s attention for a century. The department’s line on it was that it was a state to be contained by law, with no rival bloc and no symmetry: there was no Russian alliance to counter, no second camp, and the Realm’s job was to hold the line with treaties, inspection, the League and a direct telephone, and not with a bloc of its own. The department has not yet said what its line on the empire is.

The Russia and Eastern Europe Department is the most prestigious in the Foreign Office and the one that officers want. A tour on its desk is the surest route to an embassy, and its alumni hold a disproportionate share of the senior posts. The department’s own view is that the prestige is partly earned and partly inherited from a time when the work was more dangerous.

The relationship’s standing difficulty is May Day. The Realm concluded in 2006 that Russia was implicated, drafted an ultimatum and did not send it. It wrote a carefully worded acknowledgement and never apologised. Moscow regards the absence of an apology as a grievance and the department regards the acknowledgement as what it could say, and the two readings have lived side by side since 2006 without either government raising it at a summit.

The League of Nations

The Realm is a permanent member of the League’s Security Council at Kyoto, one of five, with Great Britain, the German Empire, China and Russia. The Realm sponsored the League in 1920 and it is the institution the department regards as most its own.

The department’s most steadily staffed mission is at San Francisco, where the General Assembly sits, and its Secretary-General’s office is at Geneva. The Realm has never used a veto it did not have to use, and the department keeps the count: it is a short list, and it is read aloud to every new head of the League mission on arrival.

The Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Concert

The Atlantic Treaty Organization is the Realm’s alliance, led from the Foreign Office with the Ministry of Defence, and the department regards the guarantee as automatic by design: nobody who signed it can claim to have been surprised by what it requires. The European Concert is Europe’s own union, and the Realm supports it and does not join it.

What the Realm should ask of the Concert is the department’s present difficulty. The Concert has no defence of its own, and the Atlantic Treaty Organization keeps arms; Britain, to the continent’s surprise, joined the Concert. The Realm has a mission to it and signs ordinary agreements with it, and has no framework relation with it at all. The department has worked through a cooperation agreement, a standing observer and a joint committee on trade, and has recommended none of them, and the Foreign Secretary’s most recent briefing on the subject ran to six pages and ended with a question.

The department does not regard the indecision as a failing. It regards a union a year old as a thing whose shape cannot yet be known, and it has declined to pick a form of words for a relationship that might not survive the union’s first real test. Whether that is prudence or inertia is the question the Realm’s commentators ask, and the department has not decided that either.

Cuba, Mexico and Loreto

The Americas Department’s three standing difficulties are three neighbours with three different histories.

Cuba is a non-aligned, non-nuclear republic and a close but non-allied partner. The Realm intervened in 1898, wrote the Platt system in 1902, occupied the island in 1906 and held the right of intervention until 1934. It kept the lease. The status of the Guantánamo lease is the department’s oldest unresolved question and the Register does not resolve it: the Cuban courts have before them the question whether renewing the agreement requires a referendum, and the Realm’s position is that the lease is a treaty between two states and that its meaning is for them to settle. The Cuban President, Isabel Cárdenas, has held office since 2025.

Mexico is a historical adversary after the Mexican-American War, an economic partner, and the home of a family of communities that live on both sides of the border, in the March of Arizona, California and Texas. It is also Cuba’s principal large partner in the hemisphere, which gives Mexico a foreign policy of its own and the department a standing reason to keep it informed.

Loreto is the newest. The Realm bought the Baja Peninsula from Mexico in 2027 by the Treaty of La Paz, which provided debt relief, a capital payment and joint security cooperation, and which was confirmed by a plebiscite of the peninsula by 58 to 42 and by an Act of Parliament. It was negotiated by the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office is not on the Cabinet committee that governs the Territory, whose members are the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Federation, the Home Secretary and the Attorney-General. It attends by invitation when Mexico is discussed and has said, in writing and once, that it regards its absence as an omission. It has not repeated the remark.

The purchase is morally contested in both countries, and the department has never defended it as anything but lawful.

Arabia, China, Japan and the Raj

In the same part of the world the Realm’s one large act in the decolonisation of the Dutch East Indies was the threat of December 1948 to stop the reconstruction credits that were rebuilding the Netherlands unless The Hague negotiated, a threat that the Foreign Office drafted and the Dutch government, which could not govern without the credits, did not resist. It is remembered kindly in Indonesia and mentioned in one line in the Realm’s schoolbooks.

The Foreign Office’s relations with the Kingdom of Arabia, the Empire of China, the Empire of Japan and the Empire of Raj are relations of equals, conducted by ambassadors who outrank the department’s own Americas men. They are four of the Realm’s largest relationships and the department regards them as the part of its work that is most rarely a crisis.

Japan is defended by a mutual bilateral treaty with the Realm and stands outside the Atlantic Treaty Organization by its own choice. Arabia hosts bases under leases approved by its Parliament, is not eligible for the Organization and is not required to join every Allied war. China sits at Kyoto and stands outside the alliance, and the department regards Peking as the Realm’s most consistent critic of permanent foreign bases. The Raj is a non-aligned Crown realm that shares the King and does not accept that sharing a monarch determines foreign alignment, which is the department’s own doctrine stated from the other side.

The Realm’s ambassadors to the four are among the department’s senior posts, and it fills them from the career service more often than the proportion elsewhere would suggest.

The department from inside

Careful with its words

The Foreign Office is the department in the Realm that writes best and says least. Its drafting is the standard the civil service teaches, and its own rule of thumb, passed down in the Treaty Section, is that a sentence which cannot be made shorter without changing what it commits the Realm to has been written correctly. It drafts for the foreign reader, who will read every word, and for the Commons, who will read the one that matters.

The same habit makes it a department that does not volunteer. It answers the question asked, in the form asked, and stops. Ministers describe the experience of a Foreign Office submission as being handed a perfectly balanced scale and asked to say which side they would like to be wrong on.

The Russia desk

The department’s most prestigious posting is the Russia and Eastern Europe Department, and it is also its most self-regarding. Its officers learn the language, read the Russian press at breakfast and are the only people in the building who regard the Atlantic Treaty Organization as an afterthought. They are, in the rest of the department’s opinion, the people most likely to describe a Tuesday as an inflection point.

The rest of the department’s view is not unfair and is not entirely accurate. It was the Russia desk that drafted the acknowledgement after May Day, and that wrote, in the first week of the crisis, the memorandum that said the attribution should not be acted on until the trail was followed. It was ignored until the trail was followed.

Three universities

The department recruits from Harvard, King’s College and Yale, and has done so, with variations, since the Charter. It is a self-sustaining arrangement: the three universities teach what the examination tests, the examination is set by officers who sat it, and the interview panel’s questions have changed less in a century than the buildings the candidates sit in.

The department’s own review found that the three produced nine in ten of its entrants and has done little about it. A scholarship scheme for candidates from outside the three has existed since the 1970s and has put through, in fifty years, about a hundred and forty officers, three of whom have reached ambassadorial rank. It is described in the department’s literature as a success.

Not a place careers are made

The Foreign Secretaryship is a great office of state, and it has been, for most of its holders, a place where careers were kept and not built. A Foreign Secretary is away from the Commons and from his constituents for a third of every year. His achievements are agreements nobody reads, and his failures are made in a capital he has never visited by an official he has never met.

Prime Ministers who give the office to a rival sometimes mean it kindly. The rival learns, within a year, that the office is hard to leave without a view about a country, and that a view about a country is difficult to explain at a general election.

The department and Parliament

The Foreign Secretary answers oral questions in the Commons on a fixed rota, and the Foreign Office rota is the one that members of both Houses attend. The reason is that most of what the department does is invisible until it fails, and the rota is the only regular chance a member has to ask what it is doing.

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Commons has a standing power to send for persons and papers. The department answers its reports within sixty days, by a convention that has never been broken, and has twice been compelled to produce a paper it had meant to hold. The committee cannot see the Overseas Service’s warrants or its stations, which go to the separate Overseas Intelligence Committee, and it has said so in several reports without proposing a workable alternative.

The Lords are the more informed House on foreign affairs and the department treats it with a care that its ministers in the Commons find slightly absurd. A resolution of the Lords against a treaty is the single parliamentary event the department fears most, and it happens perhaps once in a decade, and it is always the Lords.

The press

The department’s relationship with the press is conducted through the News Department, a small office that issues the Foreign Secretary’s statements, and through its dealings with the American Broadcasting Corporation, whose foreign reporting runs under the banner ABC World News.

The department accredits the ABC’s correspondents abroad, which it does as it accredits everyone’s, by a letter to the receiving government. The ABC has no London bureau, the British Broadcasting Corporation covering London and its reports being carried on ABC World News, and the department has never been asked to accredit a correspondent to a capital where there is no bureau.

There is a standing disagreement about holding reports. The department asks the ABC, in the rare case where publication would endanger a person abroad or an agreement in the last day of negotiation, to hold a report for a stated time. The ABC decides, and has refused about as often as it has agreed. Neither side regards the arrangement as a quarrel. Each regards it as the other’s mistake about its own job.

Foreign Secretaries

The office has been held by about eighty people. The holders named in the Register’s articles are these.

Four are worth naming for what the department did under them.

Hamilton Fish held the office for the whole of the Grant ministry and is the department’s model of what a Foreign Secretary is for: the restraining hand on a Prime Minister who would have done something more interesting. The Realm’s assessment of Grant’s foreign policy is mostly an assessment of Fish.

Robert Lansing led the delegation to Berlin in 1919 and is remembered, fairly, as the minister who did what the Cabinet told him and could not have done otherwise. The papers show him arguing for lighter reparations in the first week and being overruled in the second. He left the office within the year and wrote an account of the conference that the department keeps and does not lend.

Cordell Hull held the department for fifteen years and is the longest unbroken tenure it has had. His work was the negotiation of the end of the Platt right of intervention and the management of the Realm’s neutrality, and the department regards him as the Foreign Secretary who understood the difference between being quiet and being absent.

Hubert Humphrey was Foreign Secretary without the deputy premiership and held the office through the whole of the Johnson ministry. He raised serious private doubts about escalation in Indochina and defended collective policy in public. His continued service preserved Cabinet continuity and Atlantic confidence, and it also made him responsible for the policy.

The emblem

The department’s badge has nothing on it.

It is the words HIS MAJESTY’S FOREIGN OFFICE in oxblood capitals between two thin rules, on a plain field, and that is the whole of it. There is no crest, no crown, no globe, no compass and no key. There is no date, the department having been made out of two offices and not by a single instrument.

It is the same badge as the Treasury’s, in the same type, and the two departments share it for the same reason: they are the two oldest offices of state, and both of them took the view that an office with a name needs nothing to go with it. The Ministry of the Federation has an eagle, the Home Office has a door, and these two have words. The department’s lawyers add that a device would have to be defended in a dispute with the Treasury, which would be the less expensive of the two ways of losing it.

Officials say the department considered a device once, in the months after Berlin, and set the idea aside on the ground that a department which had just learned what it was to sign a document it did not write was in no position to commission a picture.

The building

The Foreign Office occupies a low brick building of 1801 on the slope below Charter Hill, in New Westminster, built for it and for nothing else. It is two storeys, it is red, and it has been extended twice at the back in ways that cannot be seen from the front. It is not the most important building in the government and it is the one that visitors are shown.

The building’s one room of consequence is the hall of flags, which holds the flag of every state the Realm recognises, replaced as governments change. In a case in the middle of the hall is the department’s duplicate of the Peace of Boston, the instrument that ended the Four-Year War, which the department keeps because it was the first treaty the Realm’s founders made as parties and not as subjects. The international American conference of 1889 and 1890 drafted its final act at a table beside it.

The Overseas Service is not in the building and its location is not published.

The Foreign Secretary

Margaret Renwick, the Foreign Secretary from 12 September 2028, leads the Conservative and Crown Union, which she has led since 2025, and sits for a constituency in the Province of New York. She comes from the party’s northeastern tradition, in which foreign policy is a matter of law and not of temperament, and she is a lawyer by training.

She was elected to the Commons in her late thirties, spent six years as the Opposition’s shadow Foreign Secretary, and had never held office before the Whitlock ministry was formed. She is the first Foreign Secretary in a generation to come to the department from outside the Cabinet’s inner circle, and she is a Foreign Secretary whom the Prime Minister did not choose.

The Whitlock ministry is a ministry of five parties on written terms, the portfolios being allocated by party under the Heads of Agreement. The Prime Minister chairs the Cabinet and does not lead it and appoints no minister and may dismiss none. The Foreign Secretary is therefore the minister the Prime Minister asks and does not tell. She was the person he asked on the night of 27 September to tell London that the Realm’s plans stay shut while the King was missing, and she did it within the hour.

The present moment

The King’s aircraft

The King’s aircraft Kittyhawk was lost at sea in September. London told the Foreign Office that Great Britain had opened Operation Tower Bridge, its plan for the King’s death, about an hour before the newspapers had it. The Prime Minister asked Margaret Renwick to tell London that the Realm’s own plan, Operation Chain Bridge, would stay shut while the King was missing, and she did.

The department’s part in the days that followed was foreign and was small. It notified no foreign government of anything, because nothing had been decided, and it held the notification that the Realm’s plan for the King’s death provides for. When Great Britain made the Queen Regent, on 2 October, the three British privy counsellors swore her at the British High Commission at New Westminster, on British ground, and the Foreign Office was told and was not consulted, as the sister-realm rule requires. The question of what the Regency means for the Realm under Article II.8 was referred to the law officers by a resolution of the Commons and not by the department, and remains open.

The Concert’s first year

The Concert is a year old. The department has not decided what the Realm should ask of it, and the decision is likely to be taken by a Prime Minister and not a Foreign Secretary.

Loreto and Mexico

The Territory of Loreto is the Realm’s newest possession and the Foreign Office’s most awkward success. It negotiated the treaty and has no place on the committee. Mexico’s feelings about the purchase are a standing item on every Americas Department briefing.

Guantánamo

The Cuban question of whether renewing the Guantánamo agreement requires a referendum is before the Cuban courts. The department has said, as it has said for every Foreign Secretary since Hay, that the lease is a treaty and that its meaning belongs to the parties. It has declined to say what it would do if a Cuban court held against renewal.

What the department does not do

It does not issue passports, which are the Home Office’s.

It does not advise the Crown in any other realm’s affairs, and does not speak for the thirteen.

It does not make war, which is the Ministry of Defence’s, and does not decide an alliance’s military response, which the Atlantic Treaty Organization’s guarantee has made automatic.

It does not run the Overseas Service, which answers to its Secretary of State and is not told what to do.

And it does not decide what the Realm thinks of the European Concert. It is still working that out.

Assessment

The Foreign Office is the most careful department in the Realm and the one most often right about the thing that does not matter yet.

Its institutional memory is the best in the government, its drafting is the standard other departments are held to, and it has kept, for two centuries and against a good deal of pressure, the one rule the Crown cannot be run without. The Realm has never had a disagreement with a sister realm that turned into a constitutional crisis, and the department’s file of differences is the reason. The 1920 Act is a real achievement: it took the worst fortnight in the department’s history and made it the Realm’s procedure.

Three failings

The Mexican border settlement of 1852 and 1853 was drawn by envoys who negotiated with the interests of settlers and not of the people who already lived along the line. The department’s own history says so, and says that the technique of the special envoy, which kept the Foreign Secretary’s responsibility clean, also kept the Foreign Secretary’s attention elsewhere. The settlement fixed a border and left a population on the wrong side of it, and Mexico has not forgotten.

Entry clearance and refugees at its posts. The Foreign Office shares its posts with the Home Office officials who decide entry clearance, and for as long as the exclusion statutes ran those posts were where the refusals were made. People who applied to cross the Atlantic from Germany in the 1930s were refused in the department’s own buildings, on a form the Home Office wrote. The department’s posts were the place a refusal was handed over, and its staff did the handing. The department has never said so, which is the Home Office’s own silence repeated at a second counter.

Recruitment from three universities. For two centuries a service that represents the whole Realm has drawn nine in ten of its officers from three institutions, on one coast, by an examination those institutions teach for. The department has a scholarship scheme and a review, and it has changed very little. The Realm’s embassies look, in consequence, a good deal alike, and a good deal like the Realm of a century ago.

The thing it has not decided

The department’s position on the European Concert is that it does not yet have one, and it has said so in public. A Foreign Office that can write a six-page briefing ending in a question is a Foreign Office that has understood the question, and a department that declines to answer it for a year has either seen further than the commentators or is waiting for somebody else to decide. The Register does not know which, and does not think the department does.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Prime Minister, for the twelve departments, the four great offices of state and the seniority of the Foreign Secretary
• The Treasury, whose badge the Foreign Office shares, and the Home Office, which issues the passports the Foreign Office’s consuls protect
• The Home Office, whose entry clearance is decided at the Foreign Office’s posts
• The Charter of Union, whose Article XIV.1 and Article II.3 are the department’s two founding clauses
• The Styles and Titles of the Crown, for the fourteen Crowns and the rule that no realm’s ministers may advise the King in another’s
• The League of Nations, whose Security Council seat at Kyoto the Realm holds
• The Atlantic Treaty Organization, which the Foreign Office negotiated at Brussels in 1949
• The European Concert, the Realm’s newest and least settled relationship
• The Territory of Loreto, whose purchase the Foreign Office negotiated and whose government it does not sit on
• The Republic of Cuba, for the Platt system, the Guantánamo lease and the Havana Accord
• The Regency, in the Contemporary Record, for the day the Foreign Office told London that the Realm’s plans stay shut

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Institutions · Ministries · The Crown and Government · Foreign Policy · Diplomacy