ABSTRACT
In June 1941, with the war in its grimmest phase, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, outlined in Parliament his scheme for reforming the management of Britain’s external relations.1 The Consular and Commercial Diplomatic Services were to be amalgamated with the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, the Foreign Office was to be divorced from the Home Civil Service, and new priorities were defined for the Foreign Office particularly in the area of external economic affairs.2
Britain’s pre-war foreign policy, summed up in one word ‘appeasement’, was commonly held to have failed disastrously, and the Foreign Office was now temporarily marginalised still further by the priorities of military strategy. The Eden reforms were intended to restore confidence in the Foreign Office by increasing its independence and authority within Whitehall. Just how sensitive Foreign Office officials were at this time to charges of failure in the pre-war period became apparent shortly after Eden spoke, when bitter controversy erupted over the part played by Sir Warren Fisher between 1919 and 1939 as the former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and the first formally designated head of the Civil Service.
