by Tom Fletcher
This reality makes it harder for leaders to set out a longer-term perspective, or to step out from the crush of events – we are all looking at our smartphones after the first thirty seconds. The public complains about sound bites, but that is increasingly all that we have time to absorb.
The reduced flash-to-bang time – from an event to coverage of it – for a major media story creates the sense of time speeding up. The pace can feel destabilising for policymakers just as it can feel empowering for everyone else. We reel from issue to issue, swamped by social media reactions, the addiction of the immediate, that don’t wait for analysis or fact. We are heading towards ‘One Big Now’.2 Any journalist will now reflect the popular reaction, often through social media, as part of their initial report on a story. Communicators have to shape the argument before Google or Twitter shapes it for them.
I have a confession. I spent more of my time in Downing Street working on communications than diplomacy. I became a spin diplomat. It is striking how often we got it wrong, across administrations, thereby contributing to the decline of trust and confidence in the political class.
One origin of this problem was that much of our foreign policy effort was overshadowed by our underestimating a breaking media story, because we were too swept up in what we believed to be a more important global issue. Maybe we were right in policy terms in setting these priorities – we thought that avoiding conflict between India and Pakistan mattered more than the prime minister’s view of the latest Strictly Come Dancing result – but the media, desperate to catch us off guard, rarely saw it that way.
So officials became more media savvy than our predecessors, always with a good story in the back pocket. We tried to sate the beast, to create or share stories that our press team could use to keep the travelling media happy. Often this would be small titbits about exchanges with leaders, the menu plans, and colour on the encounters to complement the more serious messages we wanted to get across. We would often set up an argument – normally at an EU summit – because the media liked a sense of a clash or confrontation. Several delegations did the same, most notably the French. My job in Downing Street often included deciding with foreign counterparts who needed to be seen to win each battle. This got harder as more international and domestic journalists started watching rival press conferences, quickly working out that we and the French had frequently set up completely separate arguments for our leaders to win.
As a result, the policy debate often became sidetracked by the need to focus on ‘deliverables’ – announcements designed, more in hope than expectation, to prevent the media from writing negative alternatives. We had to think more about the visuals of any meeting with foreign leaders, as demonstrated by our often grim experiences over meetings with successive US presidents. I would often spend as much time negotiating the type of press event as on the content of the meeting. The UK media focused on the former. The White House even took to calling senior UK journalists to tell them that they had not snubbed the UK. Undeterred, this tended then to be written up by the hacks as a ‘non-denial denial’.
This pantomime rarely ensures the public get good information about what their representatives are doing. Often it created an unhealthy complicity between the media and leaders and their advisers. More often it stimulated hostile elements of the press to develop competing narratives. Our efforts to dictate the story were often patronising, and created an extra incentive for journalists to ignore our narrative and seek out their own. It means that officials learn that their value to ministers, and therefore their promotion, depends on delivering good headlines, not on executing policy effectively. It also means that government is paralysed by aversion to risk – the fear of failing the test of whether a policy will look good in the Daily Mail.
One man’s propaganda is another man’s spin is another man’s public diplomacy strategy. But the sad reality is that this approach was not just bad communication; it was bad politics, bad government, and bad diplomacy. Understandably, it left people feeling disconnected.
If we are to reach for a more honest and authentic connection with the public, all that needs to change fast.
To start with, this means junking the jargon.
Diplomats are often a bit too good at making simple issues more complicated, more fudged, less transparent. In his book on Renaissance diplomacy, historian Garrett Mattingly notes with approval the ‘platitudinous character’ of the advice-to-ambassadors literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because ‘the simple and difficult rules of any enduring art’ always sound like platitudes.3
Sometimes fudge is necessary – Talleyrand was a master of the ‘short and ideally unclear’ agreement, drafted to ensure that everyone could explain it to their own constituencies in different ways. Diplomats in Brussels or New York remain brilliant at this, hence the way in which leaders can often all claim victory at the press conference after a European summit. This approach might work with thirsty journalists keen to write their copy and tuck into their moules frites, but it does not work for long.
So diplomats can too often talk about ‘being unable to remain indifferent’ to, for example, an execution or imprisonment of a human rights defender – a phrase that drips with indifference. I still hear ambassadors say things like, ‘My country views, without satisfaction, the violation of our borders.’ What? Diplomats can spend hours in international conferences debating whether to be ‘concerned’ or ‘gravely concerned’ about a massacre, while the militia involved continues the slaughter and the rest of the world carries on oblivious to the difference. They pump out bland statements saying that a situation is ‘unacceptable’ or ‘intolerable’, only to carry on accepting and tolerating it. Too many diplomatic declarations follow the tired formula ‘Minister Jack and Ministre Jacques discussed a wide range of issues of mutual concern.’ These are meaningless and fluffy platitudes – did anyone think they were meeting to discuss issues that weren’t of mutual concern?
By reducing everything to such froth, those in power patronise and underestimate the public, who simply turn elsewhere for their information. So I love it when a diplomatic meeting is described more honestly, when a leader or ambassador says, ‘Actually, it was a very tough meeting. I respect Russia’s position but I profoundly disagree with it.’4 In David Cameron’s early days as prime minister, we were criticised for his candid comments on Pakistan/India and Gaza/Israel, and worried that we had got it wrong. But his more direct language has been proved right in both cases.
In 1951, the British contingent fighting in Korea found themselves under serious aerial attack. On the radio to the nearby US reinforcements, a wireless operator described this as ‘a spot of trouble’, a classic British understatement. The reinforcements did not come in force, because US commanders took the British description at face value. The British were routed. Never had Churchill’s dictum about ‘two nations divided by a common language’ been more apt. Precision matters.
Sometimes a bit of diplomacy, in the sense of smoothing off the harder edges, can reduce tensions and avoid confrontation. But it can also often leave the observer or interlocutor confused, irritated or, worse, emboldened. Better to tell it how it is. Well-informed members of the public and media will become increasingly able to see the way in which different leaders use weasel words or tricks of translation. Likewise, deliberate diplomatic obfuscation, while it has its place, will become harder and harder as negotiators face intensified pressure to explain what they have agreed with greater clarity. Those in power need to remain relevant by presenting their work in a more accessible way.
When Yes, Prime Minister’s title character complains to his Civil Service aide that a draft statement says nothing, his Private Secretary thanks him. The public won’t. By hiding behind platitudes, we are not put on the spot to explain what we’re actually trying to do. By spending time debating whether we ‘condemn’ or ‘are gravely concerned’ we waste valuable hours that should be spent doing something about the issue t
hat we condemn.
Of course, as language evolves, there is a risk of replacing the wrong language with the wrong language. Former UK ambassador in Rome, Sir Ivor Roberts, wrote caustically in his 2006 valedictory telegram of ‘bullshit bingo’ in the FCO: ‘Wall Street management-speak … discredited by the time it is introduced. Synergies, best practice, benchmarking … roll out, stakeholder … fit for purpose, are all prime candidates for a game of bullshit bingo, a substitute for clarity and succinctness.’
It did not used to matter as much if leaders were not carrying people with them. But as power continues to move towards the individual, those ‘in power’ will have to ensure that their message is connecting with the public. They have to remember for whom they are working.
And to what purpose. Winston Churchill knew this, of course. The wartime ambassador to Spain, Samuel Hoare, once made the mistake of protesting to Churchill that pressing Franco to release captured British pilots would jeopardise Hoare’s warm bilateral relations with the Spanish government. Churchill blasted back, ‘Stuff your diplomatic relations, what do you think they’re for?’5 These words should hang at the entrance of every foreign ministry. The objective of a diplomatic meeting should not be to leave everyone feeling warm, but to pursue the national interest. Finance ministries often understand this better than foreign ministries.
So for me the most infuriating phrase in diplomatic jargon is ‘warm bilateral relations’. There is a sliding scale for measuring the warmth of a relationship that is only really understood by diplomats. Heaven forbid that relations become just ‘cordial’, ‘businesslike’, or that a meeting be ‘candid’ or ‘full and frank’. The rough running order for descriptions of a diplomatic encounter is: excellent, productive, constructive, practical, warm, good, businesslike, cordial, full and frank, candid and difficult. In a separate category is a ‘summons’. Given the diplomatic tendency to massive understatement, anything below ‘cordial’ implies a serious dust-up. ‘Full and frank’ probably means that punches were thrown. This is the kind of language that leads some to judge the quality of a meeting not by its content but by the length of the press conference or the official gifts exchanged.
‘Warm relations’ between countries are too often defined in terms of the number of visits, or feedback from courtiers. There is no league table of the warmth of our partnerships with other countries. There is no public opinion survey against which to rank changes in temperature. There is no way of saying whether our relations with Portugal are warmer than a year ago, although if you believe the telegrams most ambassadors send, relations everywhere are getting warmer and warmer. Ambassadors are not always the people best placed to judge the ebb and flow of the relationship, and certainly shouldn’t mark their own homework.
Diplomacy of course depends on the quality of relationships you can build, particularly at the top. But these relationships must be for a purpose. Do they make the countries we represent more secure and more prosperous? How do they change the lives of those we represent? Are you making a meaningful connection?
So I always said in Beirut that it was not ‘concern’ I felt about the human cost of the war in Syria. It was outrage, frustration and a determination that we must stop it getting worse. It was not warmth I felt about what we can do to promote modern Britain in the Middle East, but passion and pride to wear the shirt. I was not in Lebanon to promote ‘warm relations’. We were there to double trade, double the number of students learning English, and maximise tangible support for Lebanon’s stability. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we failed. But we tried not to describe the effort in tired clichés.
This is not just a question of taste. My concern is that empty rhetoric and purposeless platitudes make politics even less connected to those it needs to engage. Leave that vacuum and it is filled with demagogues and extremists. Powerful political communication requires a change of mindset by those in authority.
New technology is an extraordinary opportunity to jump-start the connection between the public and public servants.
Increasingly, those in political life will have to use people’s desire for connectivity rather than push against it – I now encourage people to fiddle with their phones when I am giving a speech rather than ask them to put them away. People want to play their part in finding solutions to problems, and technology makes that easier.
Content is now king. And good diplomats have never shied away from producing quality content themselves. Normally in the form of a diplomatic telegram, this was traditionally read by a handful of fellow diplomats. A recent UK Foreign Office innovation measured how many – or as it turned out to our disappointment, how few – colleagues read our internal reports. Now social media gives a means to amplify decent content at a much more influential scale. There should be no set rules on how we do this – individuals need to find their own tempo and their own voice. Governments have to recruit and empower digital natives to whom it comes naturally; and train and equip the rest of us.
New technology can even help us to crowdsource diplomacy, the ultimate in connectivity. Crowdfunding generated over $2.6 billion in 2012,6 more than the budget of most foreign ministries. But the finance matters less than the possibility of making policy decisions more democratic and accountable. To at last empower the mob. Now that is a game changer – chaotic maybe, but as I’ll argue later, the more that policymaking, including foreign policy, has been democratised, the better it has become.
Anyone seeking to connect with people and build influence using new digital tools needs to be authentic, engaging and purposeful. All three. Because authenticity and engagement without purpose equals eye-catching but meaningless stunts and slogans. You can get people’s attention, but they won’t necessarily listen to what you have to say afterwards. Much cute-cat social media does not need to be purposeful (and it would be a killjoy who suggests that it does), but a government’s social media presence needs to add up to something more than follower numbers or Facebook likes.
I worry that an increasing amount of hashtag diplomacy falls into that category. It is a great way to get attention for an issue or campaign, but social media has to be a way of marshalling action, not a replacement for it. I’ve become increasingly frustrated by online campaigns showing solidarity for countries in conflict. They are wonderful in many ways, and the cause could not be more important, but I don’t want people just to like a site or watch a YouTube video. I want them to be moved by their anger to actually do something, to contribute financially to a charity on the front line of the humanitarian response, or to lobby their government. We must avoid an era of armchair activism. As Chloe Dalton, a former special adviser to William Hague, puts it, ‘No one has ever been saved by a hashtag.’
Authenticity and purpose without engagement equals Sending Out Stuff, transmitting without listening. Much political and business communication still falls into this trap. Digital diplomacy will also fail where all it means is putting hashtags in front of what you were already going to say. The trend in marketing is away from direct advertising towards telling brand stories in a more engaging way. It has to be a two-way street, and people want to talk to a person not an institution.
Engagement and purpose without authenticity equals insincerity. Sometimes I think it is worse for leaders to be on social media but faking, than not to be on it. Being too risk-averse is a risk. If you don’t really care about football, your online avatar should not pretend to as a means of seeming more approachable – you will get caught out.
Governments, diplomats and others exploring social media should not get too hung up on which tools they use. In reality, it depends on the country they are working in, and personal preferences. Better to use the wrong tool authentically and effectively than the right tool insincerely and ineffectively. Again, the message matters more than the mode of communication. Let’s not forget of course that many of today’s shiniest and newest ideas and tools will quickly seem dated. Future books will sneer at the ‘innovative’ ideas here
in the same way I have at diplomats who did not see the potential of the telephone or stirrup.
Public humiliation aside, there are growing threats from more online engagement: the smartphone through which I connect with people can also be the means by which terrorists track my movements. But the biggest risk is not to engage. The smartest businesses aren’t debating this. They are just doing it.
So governments and diplomats need to go where people are, finding new ways to create online spaces, or public squares where we can engage and communicate. Political movements are doing this already. The Greek Pirate Party used Loomio to create almost 500 groups from municipal to national debating policy, breaking down the physical barriers to getting large groups of people in one place at a time. Those involved argue that such systems will replace representative democracy. People are much more likely to be influenced positively by direct, people-to-people connections than by anything that smells of government. Governments need to create space for those opportunities – for example by connecting school classrooms – and then stand back.
Communication that genuinely connects with people now also requires a campaigning approach. It is a journey not an event.
The best campaigns pick the right fights; create moments of jeopardy; and retain the flexibility to respond to events.
Big data and the democratisation of power will mean we need more people in government who are argumentative and challenging. Diplomats too often toil for hours, days, weeks or even months to seek consensus and agreement, crafting language that ensures people rub along. They see it as their role to be the lubricant in the machine, to ease tension and deliver compromise. They shy away from controversy. As Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, told Parliament in 1955, the diplomat is ‘forever poised between the cliché and the indiscretion’.