Diplomatic envoy turns tutor

Once the UK’s youngest ambassador and whom a former British prime minister lauded as a diplomatic genius, Tom Fletcher now serves as an adviser to the Emirates Diplomatic Academy, where he is fostering future emissaries.

Tom Fletcher is also lecturing at New York University Abu Dhabi and conducting a review of the UK’s foreign office. Delores Johnson / The National

In Abu Dhabi’s downtown Al Markaziyah district, a few hundred metres separate the British embassy from the headquarters of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy and the life Tom Fletcher used to lead.

Mr Fletcher’s business card reveals that he is a former British ambassador, but not that he was the youngest in the history of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), a record set in 2011 when, at the age of 36, he was posted to Beirut.

Nor does it tell of the four years he served in Downing Street when he worked as a foreign policy adviser to three British prime ministers, including Gordon Brown, who describe Mr Fletcher as a “diplomatic genius”.

What Mr Fletcher’s business card reveals, however, are the three letters that follow his name: CMG. They refer to the honour he was given for his work – he became a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George – a time-honoured and peculiarly British award that wags in Whitehall refer to as “call me god”.

Notwithstanding the honour, Mr Fletcher’s days in the Foreign Office came to an end after Beirut. As he now sits in his bright, new office at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy (EDA), his immediate focus is not on the 12 bodyguards and 200 embassy staff he had in Lebanon, but the students he teaches at the academy and those who are about to graduate.

When we meet, the corridors surrounding Mr Fletcher’s office at the EDA are busy with builders, camera crews and cleaners, preparing the academy for the graduation ceremony of its first cohort of students, which is taking place today.

Mr Fletcher joined the EDA in August this year as senior adviser to its director general, the Spanish diplomat Bernardino Leon, and one of his key tasks since then has been to advise on its curriculum.

“They’ve asked me to give some advice on how to develop 21st century skills. How do diplomats learn the right courage, resilience, curiosity, which have always been diplomatic characteristics, but to apply those in the internet age,” the 41-year-old says.

"How do you use a smartphone to do better diplomacy and what do big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence mean for its future?" he asks rhetorically, neatly encapsulating the subject of his recent book, Naked Diplomacy – Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age.

Mr Fletcher’s ideas about the impact of technology on diplomacy developed from his experience of having to deal with a round-the-clock news agenda while he was in Downing Street and as ambassador in Lebanon, when he posted more than 10,000 tweets, something that led Stephen Sackur, presenter of the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, to describe him as the Kim Kardashian of diplomacy.

“In Lebanon, I was often very restricted where I could go physically and to whom I could speak to for security reasons. But I had more information at my fingertips than any previous British ambassador had ever had in real time,” Mr Fletcher says.

“So, at moments when a bomb went off you’d really think about the messages you should get out at that point to try and reduce the potential for violence or retaliation. It’s classic diplomacy but with social media it has rocket boosters on.”

Mr Fletcher describes how his use of his mobile phone and social media gradually changed in Lebanon, from being merely a means of finding things out to becoming a platform for reaching out to people and eventually becoming a platform upon which longer, thematic diplomatic campaigns could be built.

“It doesn’t seem so odd now to think of an ambassador tweeting and interacting with people, but five or six years ago it was much more of a novelty and there was a shock value that I was replying to people, even if they were saying nasty things,” he says.

As well as developing campaigns to show the UK’s support for the Lebanese military or for getting children into education, Mr Fletcher also used social media to encourage improved treatment of domestic workers.

One stunt involved him swapping his role as ambassador with an Ethiopian house maid for a day, with him performing domestic tasks in the morning and the maid managing ambassadorial press conferences and meetings in the afternoon.

Images of Mr Fletcher cleaning toilets and cooking went viral among his 50,000 followers.

“I could have given a speech and three people would have come and two people would have slept through it and it wouldn’t have reached anybody,” the former ambassador says.

“That had a much bigger impact on public opinion than any speech I could have done, and I know that because Lebanese children up and down the country would tell me that they saw it on TV and that they’d had conversations at the dinner table about giving their maid the weekend off or letting her use Skype.”

Lecturing at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), blogging as The Naked Diplomat, conducting a critical review of the FCO and writing a report on the future of the United Nations have kept Mr Fletcher busy since he left government service. But it’s his views on the future of statecraft and the impact of technology on the world of foreign affairs that brought him to the EDA’s attention.

Since joining the academy, Mr Fletcher is delivering a diplomatic skills programme he designed, which includes practical workshops, role playing, seminars, debating sessions, TED-type talks and media training that cover everything from negotiation and working with leaders to making conversation, listening and building alliances. These are supplemented by visits from a list of illustrious guest speakers.

“We bring in people who can speak very powerfully about the different aspects of diplomacy. When we spoke about courage we brought in Maxime Chaya [the first Lebanese to climb Mount Everest and to reach the North and South Poles] who is about to cycle across the Empty Quarter,” Mr Fletcher says.

Other speakers invited have included Dr Amel Karboul and Baroness Catherine Ashton. Dr Karboul is the secretary general of the Maghreb Economic Forum and former Tunisian minister of tourismwho was a key part of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Baroness Ashton is a British Labour politician who served as the high representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and was the first vice president of the European Commission.

Unsurprisingly for somebody who helped to normalise ties between Serbia and Kosovo in 2013 and also negotiated the interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme in the same year, Baroness Ashton is visiting the EDA to discuss the art of negotiation, which Mr Fletcher believes to be the very essence of diplomacy.

“Promoting coexistence, that’s the essence of diplomacy. Everything else is detail. We build a lot of paraphernalia and protocol and platitudes around what we do as diplomats, which is why we’ve got this reputation for being slightly out of date, all Ferrero Roche chocolates and fancy receptions,” he says.

“But when you strip it all right back, it really is like that first cave man trying to persuade the other cave man not to hit him on the head with a club, and diplomacy has to be on the side of coexistence against the clubbers and the wall-builders.”

If Mr Fletcher is optimistic about the role that technology can play in promoting communication and understanding, he readily admits that, with the relative decline in the power and influence wielded by nation states, the diplomatic profession is facing some of its toughest challenges in about 400 years.

“A lot of power is draining away from the nation state and traditional hierarchies towards corporations and individuals,” he says.

“And so diplomacy, which has always attached itself to power, has to adjust where it gets its power from.”

In the short term however, Mr Fletcher believes that countries such as the UAE are well placed to exploit the changing political fortunes of diplomacy’s traditional heavyweights.

“With Europe and America going through a difficult period where they will be more inward-looking and a bit more introverted, then that does leave space for other actors to project their influence, and I genuinely believe that the UAE will play a broader role beyond regional diplomacy,” he says.

Given the recent events in the Middle East and what Mr Fletcher describes as situations that have repeatedly shown the increasing restraints on the use of hard or military power, he argues that the cultivation of soft power, which he often refers to as a nation’s “brand”, is becoming increasingly important.

“Without the hard power and the economic power you can’t do all of the negotiation. But there’s a great existential battle going on for the hearts and minds of many people in this region and it comes back to the point about coexistence and tolerance,” Mr Fletcher says.

“And the fact that the UAE is in this region makes it even more important that the country is projecting those values of diversity, tolerance and coexistence in an effective and coherent way because we need the UAE to win that argument for all our sakes.”