Pity the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Once supreme in Whitehall, King Charles Street is now a frail and damaged place, bleeding power and purpose from multiple wounds. It is emasculated by the interference of No. 10 and the drift towards a common EU foreign and security policy while the sun sets on our time as a first-rank power-projecting country. All this leaves the FCO seeking a raison d’être. But in climate change, it may have found one.
The political orthodoxy on the environment has now been woven into the very purpose of the Foreign Office. In the peculiar dialect of management-speak employed in Whitehall, its work is defined and directed by eight ‘departmental strategic objectives’. One of them now commits British diplomacy to ‘promote a low-carbon, high-growth global economy’.
Those are not just words. In bureaucratic terms, the smaller Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) appears to be succeeding in a remarkable takeover of the Foreign Office. Look on the Foreign Office website and you’ll find a section entitled ‘Foreign policy explained & discussed’. Click on the link referring to the Copenhagen summit and you’re whisked away to the Act on Copenhagen site run by the Department for Energy and Climate Change. It is deferring to what is, in fact, its Whitehall superior.
The slow capture of the FCO by the climate change department does not stop there. Officials from DECC now sit on the Foreign Office ‘programme board’ overseeing its climate change agenda, and on the board of the Strategic Programme Fund, the pot of Foreign Office cash available to embassies to fund local projects and policies in keeping with UK interests. The fund’s spending on climate change is growing sharply, from £4.7 million the year before last to £21 million next year.
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