Angus Colwell Angus Colwell

The lazy corpspeak of the Foreign Office establishment

Mark Sedwill

Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after the death of Jeremy Heywood, and left just two years later after the first wave of Covid.

A shame then, considering his pedigree, that he has entered the world of corpspeak and insubstantial guff. He is the co-author of a UCL report called ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs’, in which he and his co-authors call for the Foreign Office to be abolished and renamed the ‘Department for International Affairs’. They also blame our foreign policy failures on the aesthetics of the Foreign Office: ‘modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future.

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