Hello, welcome to Coffee House. I'm James Heel and I'm Tim Schittman.

And today we're going to be talking about the Foreign Office and we're delighted to be joined by

two excellent guests. We've got David Lammy's former Spad, Ben Judah and Amir Ketcher,

who resigned this week from the Foreign Office over the various criticisms. Amir,

could have summarise a piece for us you wrote in the Times.

Yeah, thanks, James. Essentially what I said in the Times is that the foreign office is hopelessly

distracted by the peripheral, and that is all to the neglect of its core mission. So I give sort of

woke examples, woke distraction, so I say that I was invited to a wild Afro

day celebration five years ago when Kabul was falling to the Taliban and, you know, right up to the

present when the main story on the foreign office intranet, and I think that's a good sort of

sign of the senior messaging or good example of the senior messaging to stuff,

is about, again, some corporate irrelevance, you know, how to seize your self-development.

So, you know, it does feel like sort of fiddling while Rome Burns.

You know, we've got a war raging in the Middle East.

And I just worry that the foreign office is distracted by corporate issues, by insular naval gazing, by sort of woke excesses.

And as I say, it's all kind of, I think, to the abandonment of a focus, a really ruthless

focus on the real foreign policy issues of the day.

What was the last straw for you then, Amir? It's a big deal to resign for a job like that. Why did you do it ultimately? Chegos was the final straw for me. But, you know, the frustrations have been building for a long time. But I just see in Cheagos an example of all of these problems coming together. There's lots to say about Chegos, but ultimately,

I think, however you look at it, is a damning indictment of our foreign policy and defense

establishment, right? I mean, Ben wrote a great piece, I thought, giving the steelman for Chegos,

but even that, if you boil it down, it essentially kind of comes down to the point that

if the Chinese land on one of those atolls, we don't have the means to defend it. You know, we can't defend a bit of sovereign territory from foreign foes. And so for me, however you look at the Chegos deal, it's wrong, we shouldn't be doing it, we should be holding on to a British overseas territory. That was the final straw, Tim.

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