ABSTRACT
To become British Foreign Secretary is to enter big-time politics. It is one of the great historic offices of state, held usually by a senior and ambitious politician. The incumbent works in the largest office of any Cabinet minister – it is larger than the Prime Minister’s office – and the other perks of the office include a grand official residence in Carlton Gardens, London, and a country house at Chevening in Kent (used for entertaining and for private meetings with visiting foreign ministers).1 As a globe-trotting statesman, the Foreign Secretary is regularly ‘door-stepped’ by the world’s media. He heads a department staffed by some of the cleverest and smoothest officials in Whitehall, and is at the hub of a worldwide diplomatic and intelligence apparatus, which is the envy of most of his foreign-minister colleagues in other countries. His days are filled with international travel and meetings with foreign statesmen, his in-tray with ‘flash’ telegrams on diplomatic crises and top-secret intelligence briefings. George Brown (Labour Foreign Secretary in the 1960s) said that, more than any other ministry he worked in, the Foreign Office brought home to him the exciting, but also the frightening, responsibility of power.2 This is ‘a job most politicians want’, says David Owen (Foreign Secretary, 1977-79).3
