“We need more like you,” former British ambassador Leigh Turner tells me as we lock eyes over a Zoom call. Can’t bluff a bluffer, but then he was a diplomat.
Leigh’s book Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and Parties explains what diplomats and ambassadors really do behind the scenes. Apparently it’s not all free parking, bottomless drinking and unending immunity. That said, there are perks, many perks, and according to the man of the moment, anyone can do it.
As I write this up, I’m sitting looking out of the window at a building site. The lure of world travel and preppy privileges is really appealing. I’m all ears.
“I have this little talk I give about lessons in diplomacy and I show the audience pictures of me aged 16,” says Leigh. “There’s one photo taken in my bedroom in Manchester with long hair and politically incorrect pictures on my wall, and I say to my audiences, “Look, if this guy can become a diplomat, anyone can.” Really, anyone can do it.
“I fancied being a diplomat because I'd lived overseas, but I’m not ashamed to say that I applied and failed the first time. If you really want to do something, you may have to try more than once.
“Once you're a diplomat, you can really get under the skin of a country and get to know the people. You're in an amazing position, because people want to know diplomats. In Kyiv, I met Roger Glover, of Deep Purple. When I was in Austria, I got to know President Alexander Van der Bellen. It’s an enormous privilege to become mates with people like that.
If you too are sold on sailing the Seven Seas, take heed of Leigh’s tricks of the trade.
Leigh’s Top 3 Rules to Becoming a Diplomat
#1 Be An Expert…If you think it's just sipping cocktails that's completely wrong (apparently)
“You're going to need to care about being the expert in something,” says Leigh. “Suppose you’re the consul in Malaga, say, you're going to have to work really hard and you're going to have to know everything about being a consul, what the rights are of British citizens, how to help them if they get into trouble and how to deal with London. You might even have to repatriate a dead body, so you're going to have to know your stuff.”
#2 Focus on people
“The most important thing of all is that you like being with people, finding out about them, knowing what makes people tick. If you're an antisocial bastard, you're not going to be a good diplomat.”
#3 Be long-term: Don’t rush into things and take your time making important decisions
“It seems hard, when life feels so hectic. But don’t forget, the ancient Egyptians and Chinese found life busy, too.”
As I’m writing this, I’m already in the job seekers queue! There’s just one thing I might not be able to manage…
“It is really important in the British system that civil servants and diplomats are politically neutral,” says Leigh. This is an absolute must, even when you’re making a complete tit of yourself representing the British government on TV. “Neutrality is our tradition and always has been,” he says. “I know that some diplomats found this really difficult and one or two actually resigned over Brexit, because they felt that they were peddling the government's lies.
“In Vienna, I was the ‘Brexit ambassador’ and I tried to remain professional at all times even when presenting positions I disagreed with. I was constantly invited on to every TV and radio show and I would always choose my words carefully. Sometimes it was embarrassing. I remember being on a panel with a German political professor who was working in the UK and he was strongly anti-Brexit. When I was using some government lines he said to me, “Why are you talking all this nonsense, I thought you were an intelligent man, how can you just recite this government garbage?” It was a difficult moment for me, because the logical answer would have been, “Look mate, I work for the British government, it is my job to represent them so of course I'm giving you the government line,” but if I'd said that, it would imply that maybe I didn't agree, so I just had to bite my tongue and trot out more encouraging statistics.
“It's not the same for some other diplomatic services. American ambassadors are appointed by the winning president. US Ambassadors who are sent to attractive places like London or Vienna or Paris are often people who've donated large amounts of money to the successful candidate. But as a British ambassador, you have to be politically neutral.
“Traditionally, foreign policy has been an area of consensus between the main parties in the UK. They’ll take chunks out of one another on domestic issues, but there has been more or less a consensus on issues like the Falklands, or Russia and Ukraine. Maybe Brexit, where both main parties were split down the middle, has begun to change that.
“Throughout my career, people said to me, “How can you work for that awful government?” says Leigh. “But you have to separate out your personal opinions from the views that you are representing. Of course you have trusted friends and relatives to whom you express your true views. I had discussions with some very important people about Brexit, which were pretty frank. But you can't publicly disagree with your government's policy if you're a diplomat, that's an absolute no-no.”
Leigh recalls his time in Russia with fond memories of scrambled brains.
“I was posted to Russia from 1992 to 95 as First Secretary Economic, when the Russians really went through very tough times,” says Leigh. “Ordinary Russians lost their savings twice. I remember as an example of the chaos we went through, there was a place called the Institute for Brain Research. It was set up after the death of Lenin in 1924 and the idea was that under Soviet propaganda, communism was such a brilliant system and the Soviet Union was so perfect that Lenin must have been a genius, so, “Let's study his brain and see what we can learn from it!” So they took out Lenin's brain and cut it into 31,000 slices and from the time of his death, right through until 1989 they were studying Lenin's brain to see what secrets it might contain. Then in 1993 the director of what had become the Moscow Brain Institute was asked “What do you think about Lenin's brain?” And he said, “Well it's nothing special.”
“As for where politics is going; we are in real trouble politically with the explosion of social media and alternative narratives, some of which are invented by people who find that they get more clicks if they say something radical and extraordinary, some of which are created by countries that want to do us harm by trying to damage our democracy. Then there are those created by genuine people who are looking for the truth and find it easier to buy into simple explanations rather than the real, complicated ones. This explosion of narratives makes it much more difficult to run a country. If we’re going to rebuild our trust in politics, we need “politicians with bottom,” with principles and consistency, rather than those who flip flop all over the place.”
Leigh speaks 8 languages that he can list instantaneously, yet insists he is “terrible” at learning them. I’m beginning to think becoming a diplomat isn’t as easy as he claims.
“Even though I’m terrible at learning languages, I did it,” he says. “You can too if you want to. I’m very motivated and I don’t mind sounding like an idiot and making a fool of myself. I had to take 3 exams to pass German at school. I got 0 out of 30 in grammar - three times. So I’m not a language genius, but I speak half decent English, then good German, good French, Russian, Turkish. My Ukrainian’s been a bit dominated by the Turkish. I also speak Dutch and my Spanish could be dusted off.”
Erh, yeah, I’ve already torn up my application.
As for the here and now, Leigh no longer sips tea with royalty, but he is into bad behaviour. I like it!
“I’m giving lots of talks on diplomacy and I’m also writing a novel,” he says. “I've got two thrillers out, one, Blood Summit, set in Berlin and one, Palladium, set in Istanbul. I've also got a book of short stories that I wrote for my girlfriend because she's a hotel general manager. They're about a female hotel general manager who doesn't put up with any nonsense from men. You wouldn't believe the tales she tells me.
“I hear so many extraordinary stories about men's bad behaviour in hotels that I felt I had to write them up and so every year for my girlfriend’s birthday I write a new one. They’re called Seven Hotel Stories. They’re quite naughty.
“Lessons in Diplomacy is the big focus at the moment, but I’ll get stuck back into my novels again soon.”
With one last attempt to recruit me, Leigh promises we can all do it. The diplomat thing, that is.
“The Foreign Office is keen to increase its diversity,’ he says. “They’ve just appointed their first blind overseas ambassador, in Slovenia. What they’re saying is anything is possible. You mustn't think that you can't be a diplomat.”
Since I’m out, who’s in? Submit your diplomatic application letters for our perusal and we’ll publish the best ones online.
