The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age

PREFACE

The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late

Shen Weiqin was the diplomatic adviser to Emperor Qin Er Shi during China’s Qin dynasty. It was a pretty cushy job, with steady access to the many pleasures of the royal court, a fair amount of arduous but interesting travel, and long periods of relative peace in which to study, opine and schmooze.

Shen knew his master’s mind and his master’s foibles, and was well suited to the role we now call a ‘sherpa’, the key adviser who helps the leader prepare for diplomatic summits. In modern statecraft, the sherpa’s assistant is called the yak, a metaphor that would also have meant something to His Excellency Shen Weiqin. The modern yak carries the mountains of paper generated and required by any modern diplomatic negotiation. Shen’s carried him.

Shen must have anticipated a routine month’s work as he set out for the Congress of the Tribes in Xianyang in 208 BC. His emperor’s armies had soundly thrashed the Chu tribe, burying alive all those who surrendered. This is what we now call hard power, though the Geneva Convention discourages such treatment of defeated opponents.

The victory left the field open for a strong peace treaty that would give Qin increased taxes and land rights, and the opportunity to recruit any remaining Chu warriors to fight for him. This would have been straightforward and probably routine business for Shen, who by this time had negotiated three such deals with the unburied survivors of other defeated clans.

Making peace is easier when you have shown you can make war. As he carried out his restorative and silver-tongued victor’s diplomacy, Shen was an early example of the statecraft that President Theodore Roosevelt aspired to many centuries later: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Only the choice of weapon was more deadly.

But Shen was to be rudely awakened from his diplomatic comfort zone. The envoys representing the Chu tribe had developed a new and innovative means of passing messages quickly, by positioning rested horses along the key trade routes. This was the third-century BC equivalent of a decent social media account. As a result, they had gathered intelligence of an uprising in the west and of disquiet within Emperor Qin’s ranks, caused by the despotism of his favourite and most intimate adviser, the flamboyant eunuch Zhao Gao (who deserves his own book). Shen’s diplomatic opponents were able to use this crucial information to hold out for a much better deal than they would otherwise have got.

Shen had been outmanoeuvred at his own game. In modern language, his diplomacy had been disrupted. The chastened and no doubt increasingly saddle-sore envoy returned with trepidation to his master to report the bad news.

As is probably already evident, Emperor Qin was no shrinking violet. The previous year he had tricked his elder brother, the rightful heir to the Qin dynasty, into committing suicide. Mercy had not got him his throne, and was not going to help him keep it.

In this case, Qin decided to punish poor execution with slow execution. Shen was tied to a wooden frame and ‘slow-sliced’, a particularly gruesome demise involving the methodical removal of 999 body parts in random order as drawn from a hat: death by a thousand cuts, give or take. The process, ‘lingchi’, literally means ‘ascending a mountain slowly’, a metaphor that resonated with his pre-summit diplomacy in a way that Shen was presumably unable to relish. His diplomatic failure was classified by the emperor as an act of treason, and so no opium was administered to ease the pain.

It is not recorded at what point in the three-day process Shen passed away. But his grisly exit provided evidence for Lu You, one of history’s first human rights activists, to argue in 1198 for the abolition of lingchi, which is the only reason we now know about the case. Again, probably no consolation to poor old Shen.

Shen discovered the hardest way that diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.

In today’s diplomatic services, the consequences for poor performers are more time-consuming yet less draconian than they were for Qin. But given that the alternative to peacemaking is often war, our diplomatic failures and mistakes can still have the gravest fallout.

It matters that we get it right.

Historical tales of grisly deaths aside, formal diplomatic encounters with contemporary Asian governments are friendly but often fairly dry affairs. Perhaps it is the heat, the time difference, or the lengthy delays caused by translation. With our Chinese interlocutors it was often striking that the army of note-takers stopped writing when their leader spoke – not only out of deference, but because they already knew exactly what he was going to say. They would tell me that they found it odd that our prime ministers were so much less well disciplined.

So I was perplexed at one of these heavily choreographed exchanges to see several counterparts on the other side of the table stifling uncharacteristic giggles and passing notes. My diplomatic antennae were well attuned to spotting potential gaffes, especially those that would appeal to our mischievous travelling press lobby, ever ravenous for stories of incompetence – working with the UK media for the UK government is often like playing for a football team whose own fans have decided should be relegated.

Trying not to disturb my prime minister as he made a complex case through a flustered translator for the rebalancing of the global economy, I scoured the room for evidence of a problem, without success. Eventually I called over one of the embassy experts, who after some deliberation pointed out that it was my name plate in front of me (the wording of which was of course visible to everyone except myself) that had caused such confusion and hilarity. Someone had translated my job title – Private Secretary to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs – as ‘Intimate Typist for the Prime Minister’s Affairs Overseas’.

There are many, too many, bureaucratic positions around the average modern leader, but few leaders have an official to type out their love letters.

I spent four years in 10 Downing Street in the role of Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under three very different prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. I also helped to advise Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in his first months in the role, giving me experience of the unholy trinity of major UK political parties.

Though the job involved little intimate typing, it did include briefing the prime minister, joining his official meetings, and circulating an account for ministries and embassies to digest and act on. The unofficial motto of the Private Secretary should be that ‘my job will be done when historians have read what I think he thinks he ought to have said’.

In reality, writing these records was only cover for the real job: a combination of policy adviser, journalist, negotiator, bag carrier and relationship manager. Occasionally I was also a therapist, administering reassurance and encouragement at tougher moments, or urging humility at better ones. Sometimes I was a translator, who could follow a prime minister and a French president to places that the female interpreter could not reach (no doubt happily for her). I was a recruitment consultant, who suddenly found senior ambassadors awaiting news of their next position to be very friendly. And even a bodyguard, as when Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe emerged from a dark corner of a United Nations summit to seek a handshake with Gordon Brown. I wrote speeches, dreamt up policy initiatives, and procured ProPlus for David Cameron from President Obama during a long summit session when two European Commission leaders had droned on for even longer than usual. I was once job-shadowed by a prince.

Few jobs in government are more gruelling than that of Private Secretary. The first voice I heard each morning, and the last each night, was the relentlessly cheerful No. 10 switchboard. The operators could gently ruin another weekend with skills that would be the envy of the smoothest diplomat. The hours meant that I would often bath my son in the Downing Street flat, and once took him to a Top Secret meeting I was chairing – he was only three, so I hope that no official secrets were compromised. During one demanding period, my wife interrupted a long weekend conference call between the prime minister and a head of state to inform us all in undiplomatic language of how fed up she was that I was still on the line. After an awkward moment to digest this, the PM suggested gently that it was probably time to end the call.

But it is worth it. Jobs in Downing Street give you a ringside seat, and often a place in the ring. Having watched the US election result alone in Gordon Brown’s office in the early hours of the morning, I woke him to tell him of President Obama’s victory. I was in the car with Gordon Brown as he left the prime minister’s official country house at Chequers for the last time, and with David Cameron as he arrived there for the first time. I listened in to President Obama’s farewell call to Gordon Brown as I walked to David Cameron’s study to brief Cameron on his imminent congratulatory call from the White House.

Few jobs can be as exciting, and such a privilege. They give you an extraordinary insight into moments of history, and the characters who shape them.

But this is not a book about my time in Downing Street, and nor is it one in which I talk about private conversations between leaders or the confidential issues on which I have worked as a diplomat – I don’t believe that public servants should write ‘kiss and tell’ books, which undermine trust between future leaders and their advisers. The anecdotes I use are purely illustrative, and the tip of the iceberg. The ‘Private’ is more important than the ‘Secretary’.

This is also not a book about foreign policy or international relations in the traditional sense of wars and treaties, maps and chaps, big powers and bigger egos. There are plenty of those written by much smarter and more knowledgeable people, and they won’t enjoy this one much. It is not a classic diplomatic memoir, in which the retired statesman – armed with hindsight, disappointment and accumulated grievance – explains why the world would be a better place if only all the pesky politicians, foreigners or fellow diplomats had listened to him more. Nor is this a classic book on diplomacy written by a leader either anxious to shape or defend their historical record,* or to burnish their statesperson credentials prior to a run for office.

Instead, I want to explain why diplomacy matters more than ever in the Digital Age, and not just to diplomats.

During my time as Private Secretary I saw technology changing statecraft. I worked for the last paper-and-pen prime minister, Tony Blair; the first email prime minister,† Gordon Brown; and the first iPad prime minister, David Cameron.1 When I started, we had to consider how policy would look on the Sky News ticker at the bottom of the screen: 140 words. By the time I left, we were judging how it would look on Twitter: 140 characters.

This shift represents wider tectonic shifts in communications, and therefore society. The iGeneration has more opportunity than any generation before it to understand their world, to engage with it and to shape it. In the years since 9/11 the globe has been transformed more by American geeks in dorms than al-Qaeda operatives in caves. Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered long after Osama Bin Laden.

But it has been citizens from Tunis to Kiev who took the ability to network that those geeks created and turned it into something extraordinary. In years to come, people may say that the most powerful weapon in this period of the twenty-first century was not sarin gas or the nuclear bomb, but the smartphone. We have seen the power of the best of old ideas allied with the best of new technology. Regimes can ban iPhones, but the freedom and innovation that they represent will get through in the end.

This new context changes everything. Increasingly, it matters less what a prime minister or diplomat says is ‘our policy’ on an issue – it matters what the users of Google, Facebook or Twitter decide that it is. Set-piece events are being replaced by more fluid, open interaction with the people whose interests we are there to represent.

So, escaping the politics, thrills and tensions of Downing Street, there was only one place to go to maintain the adrenalin. In 2011, I moved to the epicentre of many of the earthquakes shaking the Middle East: Beirut.

My nineteenth-century predecessors as ambassadors to Lebanon went by horse, traversing the Levant region at a civilised pace that modern Lebanese traffic jams try to recreate. My twentieth-century predecessors went by air and road – one, Edward Spears, landed during the Second World War and commandeered at gunpoint the first car he saw.

By the time I got there, communication was digital. Living on the Road to Damascus, I anticipated revelations. From the beginning of my stay, it was clear to me that if we couldn’t win the argument for democracy, politics and coexistence in a country like Lebanon, we’d lose it closer to home. And that social media was a new and vital tool for us in fighting that battle, just as it was a tool for our opponents. We would need to go toe to toe, tweet by tweet.

Celebrity cook Jamie Oliver, as the Naked Chef, sought to pare back cooking to the essentials. In Lebanon, I came to realise that the diplomat needs to do the same (perhaps with an iPad to protect his modesty), while preserving the skills that have always been essential to the role: an open mind, political savvy, and a thick skin. I moved from being an intimate typist to being a Naked Diplomat.

Like the best traditional diplomacy, iDiplomacy is raw and human. The ‘tweeting Talleyrands’2 need to interact, not transmit. They will learn the language of this new terrain in the way they have learnt Mandarin or Arabic.

Equipped with the right kit, and the right courage, diplomats should be among the pioneers of the new digital terrain. They are already writers, advocates and analysts, albeit for a rarefied audience. They must now become digital interventionists. The most important thing social media does for us is not information management, or even engagement. It is that, for the first time, we have the means to influence the countries we work in on a massive scale, not just through elites.

This is exciting, challenging and subversive. Getting it wrong could start a war: imagine if a diplomat mistakenly tweeted a link to an offensive anti-Islam film. Getting it right has the potential to rewrite the diplomatic rulebook. A digital démarche,‡ involving tens of thousands, will be more effective than the traditional démarche by a single ambassador, because it can mobilise public opinion to change another country’s policy.

The Internet brings non-state actors into the conversation. That’s part of the point. Those we engage with will be a mix of the influential, curious, eccentric and hostile. Once they’re in, they can’t be ignored. Diplomacy is action not reportage, so diplomats will need to show that they can use these new tools to change the world, not just describe how it looks.

I ask colleagues who are not convinced about the power of these new digital tools to imagine an enormous diplomatic reception with all their key contacts. No serious diplomat would delegate such an event, as some delegate their Twitter accounts. None would stand in the corner shouting platitudes about warm bilateral relations, as do too many people via official social media channels. No one would turn up but lurk silently in the corner, as do too many on digital accounts. Better to be in the mix, sharing information in order to get information, hearing the best of the new ideas and confronting the worst. With or without the Ferrero Rocher.

When the way the world communicates changes, so must its diplomats. They transformed the profession when the ground was cultivated, when the stirrup was invented, when sea routes opened up, when empires rose and fell, and when the telephone came along. Someone once said that you could replace diplomats with the fax. They saw off the fax, and – in more recent years – the telegram. (Yes, in that order for the British Foreign Office.)

Now we have to prove that you can’t replace diplomats with Wikipedia, just because it knows more facts. You can’t replace diplomats with Skype, just because you can now speak to far-flung places over a broadband line. And you can’t replace diplomats with Twitter, just because you no longer need to shout from a real balcony to reach crowds of people. Diplomats must adapt their business and their mindset to these extraordinary and revolutionary new digital tools.

Many of us have made mistakes on social media, but the biggest mistake is not to be on it. It is survival of the digitally fittest.

We need to seize our smartphones.

But are we already too late?

* As Churchill said, ‘History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.’

† I once received an email from Gordon Brown at 3.45 a.m. Another time I showed him a document on my BlackBerry. I was pleased when he commented ‘This is good.’ But not for long. He clarified – ‘Not your paper, that’s hopeless, the scroll function.’

‡ French term for a formal diplomatic meeting, in which the ambassador passes on messages from his capital.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP?

‘Now listen, Mother dear,’ said Basil, ‘the Foreign Service has had its day – enjoyable while it lasted, no doubt, but over now. The privileged being of the future is the travel agent.’

Nancy Mitford, ‘Don’t Tell Alfred’ (1960)

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has declared that ‘diplomacy – the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia – is dead’.1 He is not alone. Should diplomats be packing up their diplomatic bags and finding something more productive to do?