I.
Introduction: A Class of its Own Imagine a meeting in one of the ‘fine rooms’ at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office main building on King Charles Street, central London. The architecture – purposeful and grand – permanently reminds its twenty-first century inhabitants of the histories and traditions of British diplomacy, of which they are but the latest in a long line of representatives. The meeting has been convened to discuss UK economic policy in Central America. Three people are present. The first, Emily, was educated at a middle-ranking public school in Shropshire. She grew up in a modest house near Shrewsbury with just her mother, but her father, who lives in the United States, is a wealthy business owner who paid for his daughter’s education. Emily took a gap year to travel in South America, returned home to study Spanish at the University of Sussex, and after a further year spent teaching English in Madrid, joined the FCO in 2003. The second, Charles, grew up in Glasgow. His father was a bank clerk and his mother a part-time typist. He benefitted from the promise offered by the 1944 Education Act to provide free grammar school places to children who passed the ‘Eleven Plus’ examination, and achieved the necessary ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels to win a place at the University of Durham. After a degree in History, he took and passed the FCO entrance examinations in 1978. The third person at the meeting, David, grew up in social housing in Hackney, London. His parents moved to Britain from Ghana as children during the 1950s, and are both bus drivers. David attended one of the best comprehensive schools in the country, and thanks to a number of outreach projects run by Hackney Council and by local charities, had work experience in the Houses of Parliament and in the office of an MP. Exceptionally clever, David took part in a social mobility scheme run by his Local Authority designed to help disadvantaged teenagers apply to Oxbridge. He was successful, reading Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the FCO shortly thereafter, in 2015. The dynamics at play in this imaginary room offer clues as to the degree of influence class holds in our lives. Who – Emily, Charles, or David – do you think commands the most authority at this meeting? Who is likely to be the most confident, and who the most insecure? And how did where they grew up, where they went to school, and what jobs their parents did become so crucially important to their own working lives? Meetings like that between Emily, Charles and David have been taking place at the Foreign Office for nearly 250 years. Much has changed in that time: the bowler hats, inkwells and moustaches are long gone, replaced by video teleconferences, instant messaging and flexible working. But one thing has been consistently present since 1782: the accusation that the British Foreign Office is an elitist institution.
6
