A pamphlet by former senior diplomats has triggered an identity crisis: must we cling onto tradition or embrace a new vision of Britain? Lucy Kenningham investigates

Just as the era of the nation state started to really take off, Britain’s Foreign Office (FO), as it was first called, was created in 1782. Since then, it has existed to promote the UK’s interests, both ideological and commercial, overseas; and to support our citizens living abroad. Its tools are soft power and diplomacy. You’ll find it in King Charles Street on Whitehall in a grand building built to impress foreign visitors at the height of the British empire in the 1860s.

The FO became the FCO when it merged with the Commonwealth Office in 1968. In 2020, it added a new consonant becoming the FCDO (or “F*CkeD Off” amongst some of our great country’s more potty-mouthed civil servants) when the FCO merged with the Department for International Development (known as Dfid – which had been founded by Tony Blair in 1997). This........

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