#foreign office

3 December 2025

By Sean Coughlan, Royal correspondent

Fallen London Travel Guide:

The Foreign Office

Recalling those days in 2023, I still wonder what was the best way to react.

Jonn, my boss, yelled at me. His instruction was always confusing. “Can you do this in that way?”

So I tried to confirm, “What is this? What is that way?” Suddenly, he pissed off, “Why you can't understand!!! Are you stupid?! You are in this industries of years and why you don't understand?!”

Other day, he said, “Can you make this graph into yellow bar chart?” I changed the graph in the system to yellow barchart. He said, “No! I said to make it red line chart!! You didn't listen to me?!”

The other day, I had a call with a client, and I wanted to confirm something with her. Suddenly, he said, “Let’s stop meeting.” He then let the client out of the virtual meeting room and started yelling at me, “You didn't read the document?! If you had read the document, you wouldn't be asking those questions!”

I told him this was improper communication, which you should not take in the office. Please respect me as a professional. He replied, “Oh, you don't know want to work with old guys?! If you can't stand this, you can't work with someone older than you!” I said, “Don’t make an excuse with a reason of something that you can't change, such as age, gender, ethnicity, etc.” He said, “It is normal here!!! Go home and never come back to the office.”

Lord Chalfont tells a story about his days as a Junior Minister in the Foreign Office. He attended a very grand dinner party, and spotted a lady standing alone in a long red dress. The besotted Chalfont staggered across to ask if she would waltz with him. The lady drew herself up: "I will not waltz with you for three reasons. First this is not a waltz, it is the Czech national anthem. Second, you are drunk. My third and greatest objection is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Prague".

- Auberon Waugh, Diaries (2 May 1976)

The story could well be authentically true. A variation of this story was more usually told about Lord Chalfont’s then boss, the Foreign Secretary George Brown in Prime Minister in Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s. Chalfont - born Alun Gwynn Jones - was a decorated soldier (a Military Cross recipient due to his bravery in action and especially a hand-to-hand firefight with communist guerrillas in Malaysia in 1957) and a notable defence correspondent with the London Times before being tapped for Defence Minister in 1964 by Harold Wilson. He was placed in charge of Britain’s negotiations to join the European Common Market. An ancillary task was to prevent the frequently inebriated foreign secretary George Brown from embarrassing the government.

George Brown is long forgotten figure in British politics but in those days he was notorious as Harold Wilson’s drunk and touchy Deputy Prime Minister. He was always falling over and/or shooting his mouth off. He had a long standing drinking problem that was obvious whenever the made television appearances. Brown, indeed, once boasted that, “Many members of parliament drink and womanise - now, I've never womanised.”

Chalfont was the source of the famous story of Brown requesting a dance from a scarlet-clad figure at a reception who turned out to be a cardinal. Only in this telling it was a ball where the Peruvian national anthem was being played and not a waltz and it was the archbishop of Lima that the drunkenly Brown asked for a dance. It was this latter story which - fanned by Chalfont and others - which became apocryphal amongst Foreign Office diplomats and the diplomatic dinner circuit for decades to come. Whatever the truth it’s a stonking good story to break the ice at any dinner party.

Melanie Phillips follows up a report by David Rose in the Jewish Chronicle, showing how over £65 million of British taxpayer’s money has been wasted on the Palestinian Authority, supposedly in the name of teaching human rights. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority continues its brutal repression of civilians. The picture you see above is of Palestinian Authority thugs beating a human rights campaigner to death. Such brutality is routine behaviour under the Palestinian Authority, so our taxpayer’s money clearly has not made any improvement. 

Phillips shows how this misguided do-gooder mentality from the British Foreign Office stems from belief that by training and negotiation, a viable Palestinian state can be created which will end the Israeli-Arab conflict. But if the ugly truth were better known, that the Palestinian Authority is nothing more than a band of kleptocratic thugs who have no interest in running a viable state alongside Israel, this would necessarily damage support for the Palestinian cause as a whole. This is essentially a choice between comforting lies or the uncomfortable truth.