Sweet FO:Inside the Foreign Office.

"Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way".

BBC2's recent Inside the Foreign Office was, like much in politics at the moment, a bit of a muddled affair. It didn't seem to know if it wanted to do a PR job for the FO and, particularly, the less celebrated civil servants who work for it, or if it wanted to be a hard hitting documentary about the power games and dynamics of international deal making.

Ultimately, it fell between two stools but, despite that, it was often an interesting and illuminating watch. The fact the first episode aired on 15th November 2018, the day the Brexit shit really hit the fan, made it timely too. I wondered just how happy Boris fucking Johnson was that day, the day Britain's foremost political arsonist could don his fireman's outfit and offer to put out the fire that his own craven behaviour had helped start before throwing wood upon.

Boris does not come out of the documentary well at all. But that's not a stitch up job. It's because Boris is a corrupt, incompetent, liar skilled only in the art of putting the blame on others and stabbing people in the back. Occasionally, during this three part series, he talks almost like an actual human, and there are parts where you suspect, incorrectly it turns out, that he may occasionally tell the truth.

You only have to see the appalled faces of his staff as he is announced as Foreign Secretary by Theresa May to see just how unsuited he is to the job and how little respect people who have to work for and with him have for him. On a jaunt to Portugal to promote the oldest alliance in the world he breaks off to film something for his Twitter feed and we see his aides having to constantly remind him that he's making up 'facts' on the spot. He's a snake oil salesman and even by the current lowly standard of UK, and world, politics, a charlatan of the highest order. He can't even arrange Ferrero Rocher for an Ambassador's Reception.

The 17c diplomat Henry Wotton said "an ambassador is sent abroad to lie for his country" and in that at least we cannot dispute Boris's credentials. Wotton's quip was intended as a triple entendre. Lying referred to untruths, lying about doing nothing, and the more euphemistic suggestion that diplomats were screwing their way round the world. In some ways, the perfect job for Boris. If, a disaster for those he's supposed to be serving.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, now degraded by Johnson's appointment, was once seen as the heart of the British Empire and in its Permanent Secretary, one Sir Simon McDonald, we meet someone who still sees it as a hugely prestigious appointment even if Boris does his best to make a mockery of it by quoting Emperor Hirohito of Japan during his unveiling. The civil servants must be wondering what the fuck they'd done wrong to deserve this arsehole.

An arsehole, an egregious twat, who goes on to outline his plans for both Russia and Iran. Two places, in the cases of the Skripal poisonings and the extended imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, he resolutely and spectacularly failed in. When Roy Hattersley couldn't make an appearance on Have I Got News For You he was famously replaced with a tub of lard. Zaghari-Ratcliffe would have been better served by a tub of lard than by a man who looks like he eats one for breakfast.

As Boris continues to heap shame on both the country and the 14,000 staff at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, we, the viewers, get to meet some of the less famous, but hard working and kind, people who make their living within the establishment. Senay, who works mainly in Yemen, Judith Gough, her majesty's ambassador for Ukrainre who's based in Kiev, and Dan, responsible for Myanmar.

These are honest, well meaning, people who believe in what they do and we see them arrive at the UN in New York where a cut to Donald Trump reminds us that there are people in the world even more amoral, dishonest, and just plain shit than even Boris fucking Johnson (whose lack of attention to detail, nevertheless, remains jaw dropping throughout). Interviewed diplomats manage to say some reasonably nice things about Trump which no viewer will believe they mean. They are, after all, diplomats. This is their job.

There's more serious stuff to discuss. The Litvinienko poisoning, the annexation of Crimea, and Putin's backing of Assad in the Syrian civil war. Boris is adamant that there will be no help for Putin unless Assad goes. Another load of worthless hot air from a vainglorious man whose only interest has ever been in self-promotion.

More serious minded politicians and civil servants congregate to discuss potential ISIS war crimes at a table that soon the UK may no longer be welcome at. The UN Security Council consists of representatives from five nations:- USA, Russia, China, France, and the UK though some have suggested that Britain's diminishing presence on the world stage following the disaster of Brexit should see the UK removed from the council.

As Theresa May, Ivanka Trump, and Amal Clooney put in brief cameos we rejoin Judith Gough who's off to the east of Ukraine where Putin is believed to be arming separatists. Putin, of course, denies this but the war in Ukraine has cost over 10,000 Ukrainian lives so far and Putin is a known, and proven, liar.

There are meetings to discuss other worldwide flashpoints:- the 400,000 Rohingya fleeing Buddhist military extremists in Myanmar, Boko Haram's activities in Nigeria, and Brits who've found themselves in prison in Siem Reap in Cambodia for 'pornographic dancing'. Which turns out to be wearing swimming costumes at a pool party.

Elements of the show are very Yes, Minister (there's even a Sir Humphrey joke) and the tension between human rights abuses and trade is broached a little gingerly. There's lots of footage of serious looking faceless men in suits. We see Brazilian diplomats eyeing up post-Brexit Britain as a country they'll be able to strike a favourable (to them) deal with and learn, unsurprisingly, that outside the EU Britain is now viewed as a wounded animal, away from the safety of the pack, and ripe to be picked off.

Away from Dan Shugg in his huge colonial gaff in Myanmar strumming out Wonderwall on his guitar, we get to see of some of the vital and urgent work civil servants do. The most urgent, and most tense, of all being the case of a seventeen year old girl from Birmingham who has been taken to Iraq and will, on her soon to come eighteenth birthday, be forced into marriage with her cousin.

She wants, understandably, to escape but she needs to get to the safety of the British embassy in Baghdad before she is killed for attempting to do so. Luckily, she makes it - with a lot of help from FO diplomats. It's testament to the great work some of them do but higher up the chain of command there's a lot of 'management class'. Plenty of glib, highly entitled people born into a privilege they can never understand. These 'hail fellows, well met' now, and pretty much always have, run the world. They're making a fucking mess of it.

Which this series, possibly accidentally, highlights. It's, of course, a truly international venture. One minute we're in London, the next in Lisbon or Lagos, later we're looking at the destruction caused by Hurricane Irma in the British Virgin Islands. There are lighter moments too:- a 'tasteful' birthday party for the Queen (sponsored by Shell and Virgin Atlantic!), there's footage of an attempt to sell pollution masks from Cambridge at a Mongolian fashion show, and there's Palmerston, the FO mouser, a cat who has 66,000 followers on Twitter.

The people who come out of it in the best light are the ones who do the actual work, as opposed to the ones who take the glory, but an honourable mention should go to Alan Duncan who, despite being a Tory, appears to be the anti-Boris. He listens, he takes advice, and he does his job with a sense of duty.

Unsurprisingly this gets him way fewer column inches than Boris who, despite being replaced by Jeremy Hunt during filming, lingers like the smell of a bad fart in a lift and wobbles and bullshits his way through the entire series. If he's not trying to sell cheese to the French, resigning over a Brexit he was instrumental in, or falling asleep on aeroplanes, he's lying, lying, and lying some more.

At one point we see Simon McDonald address an annual gathering of almost all of his staff. He talks about how France came out of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 well and how the way Germany was treated following WWI contributed to the destabilisation that led to the rise of fascism and the disasters of WWII. He said how Brexit is handled in Britain, and Europe, is now of comparable importance. That's the size of the task he's dealing with and that's the size of the task we're dealing with. We need more people like Senay, Alan Duncan, and Judith Gough working for our future and a lot less like Boris fucking Johnson.

 If you come away from this show thinking that Trump and Putin are clear and present world dangers and that Boris fucking Johnson is possibly the most inept, and most venal, politician operating in the country at the moment, then I can only say "that might be your view. I couldn't possibly comment".