A senior diplomat has resigned from the Foreign Office, claiming the government is being constrained on Cyprus and the Chagos Islands by strict interpretations of international law.
Ameer Kotecha stepped down from his post as head of Palestinian issues at the British embassy in Tel Aviv this week, saying that the civil service had been mired in a culture of dysfunction and reduced from a Rolls-Royce to a “banged-up hatchback”.
He said the government’s decision to cede control of the Chagos Islands and Sir Keir Starmer’s failure to act immediately after Iran’s attack on a British base in Cyprus had influenced his decision to leave.
• Ameer Kotecha: Foreign Office fails to put Britain first. That’s why I’ve quit
Kotecha, who joined the department in 2014 and has held posts in Russia, New York and Hong Kong, said: “Rather than a really clear-sighted, level-headed assessment of what’s in the national interest and what’s good for the UK, we’re instead having our entire foreign policy dictated by what the lawyers tell us international law requires.
“I’ve taken my duty of civil service impartiality seriously, but the frustrations have got too much and frankly I think the system is broken. I’m ashamed to serve this government, so I’ve decided to throw the towel in.”
Kotecha claimed that civil servants were regularly distracted from their duties by Foreign Office initiatives and that ineffective civil servants were regularly promoted. He claimed that some diplomats worked from home because they did not want to work in a “colonial” office building.
“It’s this constant focus on the peripheral and the cuddly rather than a really relentless focus on the core of what the Foreign Office is meant to be there to do, and I think that’s something that afflicts all government departments in their own different ways,” he said.
Some civil servants in the Foreign Office worked from home rather than attend a “colonial” building
ALAMY
Kotecha recalled that on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, he was invited to mark World Afro Day and attend a panel discussion with a Foreign Office director responsible for matters of national security.
He said that after war broke out in the Middle East last week and the British base on Cyprus was attacked, the main news on the Foreign Office intranet concerned the “FCDO capability framework and self-assessment” and urged all staff at headquarters and around the world to “take charge of your development”.
Kotecha said: “These provide a decent illustration of why, after over a decade, I have resigned from the diplomatic service. The dysfunction runs deep.
“This is not culture war mudslinging. It is simply an illustration of a civil service culture hopelessly distracted by the peripheral, to the neglect of its core mission”.
Kotecha, the author of the late Queen’s official Platinum Jubilee Cookbook, called on the government to hire more people from the private sector, give ministers greater control over mandarins and to prioritise results over “paper-pushing”.
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“Reform will not come from within — Robert Conquest’s Third Law puts it well: the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
“If the civil service was once a Rolls-Royce, it is now a banged-up hatchback driven by someone with decidedly dicey vision and a passionate hatred of driving. Our country will not get back on track until the car and the driver are made roadworthy once more.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We expect officers in the diplomatic service to uphold the highest standards of integrity and serve the government of the day impartially.
“If a member of staff feels they are no longer able to serve in that capacity, the correct course is for them to resign.”