We do things differently now. Partly, this is down to technology. Lord Liverpool could hardly pick up the phone or send an email from his BlackBerry. Partly, too, it is due to the interlocking social and political changes in Britain over the last two centuries that have shifted the balance of power away from a tightly-knit aristocratic elite whose members had largely been educated at the same public schools. Primus inter pares — the principle of cabinet government in which the PM is held to be merely the first among equals — came much more naturally to prime ministers and foreign secretaries in an era when both were independently wealthy. Neither would really leave the establishment even when they left office, and both possibly had their first sexual experiences with each other at Eton or Harrow.
Mass democracy and the advent of mass communications have changed all that — or most of it. From London, through Paris and Berlin to Washington, the buck now stops with the head of government. The foreign ministers and their teams may do the heavy lifting but it is the premiers and the presidents who sign the big deals, do the photo-ops, make the big speeches and take the credit, as well as the flak.
The era of the big personality (in Britain as elsewhere) stamping his authority on a country's policies towards the outside world from the foreign ministry is over, as Hurd perhaps hints to us by ending his survey with Anthony Eden in 1955. But there is another dimension to consider. If the growing importance of the PM has tended to pull powers away from the Foreign Secretary from above, there has been a corresponding force pulling powers away from below as the professional diplomats who run our foreign ministries have accumulated unprecedented influence and, one might add, the celebrity that goes with it.
They have been able to do so in the context of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of international affairs as the UN, the EU and the institutions of international law demand the ceding of ever more powers from the nation state. With the growing power of such institutions we are witnessing nothing less than what the dissident Yugoslav Marxist writer Milovan Djilas referred to in a different context as the emergence of a "new class", which sees international diplomacy as both an end in itself and a means to exercise power for themselves. It is they, after all, who form the natural constituency from which the leaders of the global institutions are drawn.
With the emergence of this new class has come an ideological edifice to sustain it. Hence the Foreign Office's ill feeling towards the US, the one Western power that international institutions cannot easily contain. Hence its support for the EU — a counterweight to the US and a handy option for jobs and security.
