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.@prashantrao and I spoke to more than a dozen current and former diplomats about the changing nature of their work. The picture that emerges is of a systemic decline in trust, sparked by #cablegate and then fuelled by a series of other breaches leading up to the Darroch affair
"This breakdown in trust has potentially severe implications for diplomacy, but also for foreign services and the formation of overseas policy more generally if ambassadors feel unable to report the reality on the ground as they see it for fear of political upset at home."
"In the longer term, this shift may have even more profound implications than creating drier, more circumspect cables, as diplomats pursue new and riskier routes or face-to-face briefings outside official channels to protect themselves."
"The more official channels are bypassed, the more chance there is of a security breach or mistake going unrecorded... undermining public trust in the system, by ensuring there is an incomplete record on potentially key decisions that may become the centre of future inquiries."
"If diplomats are secretly communicating in ways that cannot be recorded, released under FOI, or even archived for future record, the risk of mistakes going undetected may rise, lessons unable to be learned, cover-ups facilitated, and even corruption undetected."
