Standards in Whitehall have not exactly been high for quite some time. Whether it is working from the sofa, demanding a four-day week or going on strike, the public have come to expect little from civil servants these days.
But the very least one might expect of the Foreign Office, surely, is that officials are on top of the various agreements Britain has signed with other countries. While treaties have to be published, other arrangements, such as memorandums of understanding and other non-legally binding instruments, do not.
With the world as volatile as it is, Mr S was intrigued to look over a list of diplomatic coups recently achieved by the FCDO and other Whitehall departments in the form of non-legally binding agreements. One was requested from officials. But alas, it turns out no such record exists. The FCDO either does not know, or will not say, what its departments are agreeing in deals with other countries.
Indeed, Foreign Office minister Seema Malhotra said: ‘Non-Legally Binding Instruments (NBI) such as Memorandums of Understanding can cover a wide range of topics and can be negotiated by any Government department. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office does not keep a central list of such instruments.’
If Whitehall is unable or unwilling to tell us what foreign deals the Government has made, how ob earth can we trust ministers working on a new deal with the EU to be open and transparent about it? If Sir Keir Starmer is so keen to trumpet his success on the international stage, how is there no central list of all the deals secured since he won power?
Such questions have now been raised by shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, who told The Spectator:
If Labour can’t tell us what they’ve signed our country up to, how can they be trusted to get good deals for Britain in the future? They should stop dodging scrutiny for once and give the public the facts. As the aborted Chagos deal shows, when Labour negotiates, Britain loses.
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