Goodbye to All That

In the heyday of empire, British representation abroad often consisted of a well-connected royal appointee ruling one of the crown's dozens of far-flung colonies in style. Throughout the tropics of Asia and Africa, governors-general sweated through noontime heat in white-plumed hats and braided uniforms, lived in white palaces called Government House and spent much of their time hobnobbing with maharajahs, sheiks and local princelings.

With the fading of empire came a new kind of presence, dominated by the Commonwealth Office and Britain's elite, 154-year-old diplomatic corps. The corps' own style, always rigid and decorous, has relaxed somewhat in recent years, allowing ambassadors to shed their uniforms and correspond with London in cables rather than in formal script. But its expense has not. Last year diplomacy cost Britain nearly a quarter of a billion dollars--a style that the purse-pinched government in London can no longer afford.

Whither Barataria. At the government's request, a three-member committee, headed by Sir Val Duncan, chairman of Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation Ltd., has been studying British representation abroad for a year. Their report, just released, may upend yet another British institution. Comparing Britain to "a man who decides that his requirements no longer justify the upkeep of a Rolls-Royce," the committee recommended "a significant reduction" in the size of the diplomatic service, a 50% slash in the size of overseas information departments, and a one-third cut in the number of armed-service attaches. Moreover, said the committee, the "balance of the workload" should be precisely the duties that career foreign service men have traditionally shunned as undignified: the "commercial objective" of drumming up overseas orders for British goods.

To carry out its recommendations, the Duncan report suggested that the foreign service divide its operation into two spheres: the "area of concentration" and a second-class "outer area." The first consists of major countries of Western Europe and North America--plus a few others, like Japan and Australia --that are "advanced industrial countries with which we are likely to be increasingly involved." In these, the committee recommended, the foreign service should continue a full range of activity. In the "outer area"--meaning most of the rest of the world--its report could find no justification for large information missions or for detailed political reporting other than "an occasional forward-looking assessment of a general 'whither Barataria' nature." Should the committee's recommendations be accepted, most of the former colonies that imperial viceroys once bestrode will become threadbare outposts of salesmanship diplomacy.

God Bless. No one has yet taken any action on the Duncan report. The only official response came from Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary Michael Stewart, who spoke in the best tradition of diplomatic vagueness about it before the House of Commons. The report, he said, was "far-ranging" and drew "important conclusions," but the government would give no endorsement before contemplating it further. It was, nonetheless, a topic of some interest to British diplomats--and a few seemed to get the message instantly. Last week, Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, Her Majesty's Ambassador at Rome, pulled up in the embassy Rolls (his requirements apparently still justify one) at a ceremony on the fashionable Via Veneto to mark the opening of Italy's first Wimpy Bar --a British-owned hamburger chain. Intoned Sir Evelyn: "God bless this bar and all who frequent it."

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