Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Debatable Discussions podcast. You join us today for another exciting episode as we're with a very interesting guest.
Speaker: Today we're really excited to be joined by Lee Turner, who, as you might know from Instagram or TikTok or wherever else you're a social media, is a former ambassador of the UK in the Ukraine, in Austria, and as well as that he was consul general in Istanbul, Turkey.
Speaker: ah director of the overseas territories, but we'll get into all of that as well. Lee's also a writer and has recently published a book, Lessons in Diplomacy, that I highly recommend. In the next couple of days, there'll be a review of it on our website, but also do check out Lee's website or his Instagram profile where he gives some insights from it and find whether that would be something you'd be interested in.
Speaker: Now, the first question i want to start with is sort of about your career and journey. And how did you actually end up joining the Foreign Office? And do you think your upbringing and growing up in Lesotho and Swaziland helped that respect?
Speaker: Certainly, yeah. I think for me, my father was a university professor and back in the 1950s. So this was just like 10 years after the Second World War or even less than that. He and my mother wanted to make the world a better place. And one of the ways that they felt they could do that was to go off to northern Nigeria, to the Muslim part of Nigeria, where there was something called the Nigerian College of Arts and Technology.
Speaker: And so my father went to this place in Zaria to teach there. This was in 1951 or 52. ah My elder brother was actually born in t Zaria, and then I was born a few years later. My mother came back to the UK to have me because the experience of having a child in Zaria was pretty tough. So anyway, so I was traveling even before I was born. Spent three years in Nigeria, and then later six years in Lesotho, which you mentioned, Diane.
Speaker: By the time I came back to the UK in 1970, aged 12, I'd already spent nine of my 12 years overseas. Although I then grew up in Manchester and went to Manchester Grammar School and to Cambridge, the idea of working all my life in the UK seemed kind of somehow not enough And I liked the idea of being able to travel, to get under the skin of countries, to really understand different cultures and different places. This was all the kind of thing I wanted to do. But of course, I then applied in 1979 when I finished university and I failed to get in.
Speaker: I didn't get into the diplomatic service. there I went off and did four different jobs in Department of Transport, Property Services Agency, Department of Housing and Local Government, and then the Treasury before I then reapplied for the Foreign Office. And this time I did get in.
Speaker: How did you find your experience working at the Foreign Commonwealth and now Development Office? or Was it particularly rewarding or was it perhaps in a difficult position with Britain's declining global influence in the late half of the 20th century?
Speaker: There's always a great debate about the Foreign Office building. If you read the book, there's actually a chapter about this. ah The fact that the building was... put up, designed and erected in the 19th century at the peak of Britain's colonial period. Like it or not, the empire stretched around the world and the Foreign Office main building kind of reflects that. It used to be four different buildings that have been merged together. For instance, it used to be the Home Office, the
Speaker: colonial office, the India office, and the foreign office, and they're now all one building. But it is grandiose in the way of many 19th century buildings in the centers of power in the UK and other countries. And it's full of politically incorrect art. I mean, to call it politically incorrect is a massive understatement. Pictures of kneeling black women, black is presenting the wealth of their countries to naked white women sitting on rocks while ships sail away in the distance carrying booty. I mean, it's all pretty terrible. And so there is a question about the culture of the Foreign Office. And there was a lot of talk back in the 1950s of demolishing that building and moving the Foreign Office off to
Speaker: Elephant and Castle or Manchester or somewhere else, so they didn't get ideas above their station. That's never happened. I think it's probably a good thing because the building is very magnificent. There is this kind of tension, as you say, John, ah imperial past, which many people would see today as being a very execrable period of our history. Other people would see it as being a great part of our history. And the present, where we're a medium-ranked power with economic power,
Speaker: problems. And I always tell people, you should you should never exaggerate the decline of the UK any more than you should exaggerate the continued power of the UK.
Speaker: I've been struck on many occasions, for example, once I went with a counter-terrorist team to visit Poland just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 1990.
Speaker: And we were visiting the Polish special forces. I went there with some representatives, military representatives of the UK government who specialized in this kind of thing.
Speaker: And we were talking to the Polish special forces and they said, we'd really, really like to work with the UK. And I said, why is that? There's many countries in the world.
Speaker: And the head of the Polish Special Forces said, yeah, well, obviously we don't want to work with the Russians. I mean, that's very problematic. We certainly don't want to work with the Germans. No question of working with the Germans. And then the Americans just make everything so complicated. So it's really you and the French. And the French, you know,
Speaker: difficult. So look, and and you've got such a great record. So we'd like to work with you. And this was a bit of ah a light bulb moment for me when I suddenly thought, well, yeah, we we're not the biggest or most important country in the world by a long chalk, but we do have this tradition of foreign policy excellence. We have very good intelligence services. We have very good military.
Speaker: We have the United Nations, of which we're a permanent member of the Security Council for the time being at least. And this does give us a certain heft in the world. And so there is this contrast between our imperial past, which many people would rather forget, at least not exaggerate the importance of, and then the present, where we are really in a very difficult complex.
Speaker: And i do think that the Foreign Office can play a very important part in helping the UK to achieve its objectives in that complicated world now as previously.
Speaker: On the UN, when you were ambassador in Vienna, you also were the permanent representative of the UK, the UN. How did you find the sort of inner workings of the UN? How was it more sort of challenging perhaps than your role on a day-to-day basis ambassador to ah to a country?
Speaker: Good question. So there's various levels of diplomacy. So you have bilateral diplomacy where you're dealing with usually just one other country. i wouldn't say it's easier or harder than anything else, but it's certainly one kind of diplomacy. Then you have multilateral diplomacy. And you might be dealing with the European Union, for example, where you have 26 27 countries.
Speaker: partners or competitors who you're negotiating with all the time, and every single one of those is trying to achieve their objectives while paying at least lip service to the principle of being communitaire or pro-EU. And then you have the United Nations, where you have, I think, 193 we speak,
Speaker: all of them with different agendas, different degrees of expertise, and a very difficult negotiating environment. One of the things I found there is that engagement is everything. If you are fully engaged in United Nations, you have experts who know the rules, you have people there who know the history of the issues you're dealing with, your chances of getting results, getting the results you want.
Speaker: a thousand times greater than if you go there unprepared and not really understanding how the organization works. And it's always about building alliances with a variety of different countries. It's always about being clear what you can sacrifice and what you can't sacrifice. And it's often about really important.
Speaker: So the UN is extremely challenging. But at the same time, when it goes well, when you're in that smaller room with a group of the most important countries dealing with a certain issue and you're trying to sort out a way forward, that is one of the most rewarding types of diplomacy, if it goes well.
Speaker: On that note, how do you think we should reform the UN? Obviously, with the Security Council, I suppose many would critique it for having a very rarely unanimous resolutions passed, for example.
Speaker: How would you reform the Security Council the UN in general to perhaps make it more effective? I talk about this a little bit in Lessons in Diplomacy, actually. It's a very dysfunctional organization. Like any big bureaucracy, it's afflicted by all kinds of problems. And in the United Nations, you have additional problems, such as trying to recruit evenly from the whole membership of the UN, where some of the smaller countries haven't got enough people there, and they get people into the UN. And then once they're there, some The degree of engagement with their jobs is very variable from some countries, unfortunately. And so it's a really difficult organization to work in. It's a very difficult organization to change because to change the UN, you need unanimity.
Speaker: And really, the prospects of changing it are minuscule unless you have a degree of international involvement.
Speaker: readiness to do those reforms. We saw after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, a kind of golden moment where it was possible to agree some very important resolutions. For example, on the first Iraq war after Iraq invaded Kuwait,
Speaker: Russia didn't stand in the way of the resolutions that made it possible to launch the freeing of Kuwait at that point. But it was a fleeting moment, and many Russians would say that they were deceived and disappointed by the way they were treated when they weren't sticking their oar in to prevent anything happening. And since then, they've been making up for it in a big way. Trying to get anything through the UN these days is very difficult. So it's tempting for those people who don't like the UN, and I would probably put the current US President Donald Trump amongst that number, to try and set up alternative arrangements. And we've seen this so-called Board of Peace set up really under US leadership, which many people see as being an attempt to undermine or weaken the United Nations.
Speaker: For me, I would say, first of all, the Board of Peace has very limited membership, and it's really in no way representative. It hasn't actually achieved anything yet. We'll see if it does. Secondly, the United Nations, although it is a highly imperfect organization, is the best organization we've got. Yeah. and we should hold onto it tightly and try and work with it, try and improve it in small ways that can be done without massive operational changes that require a majority and keep going with it. And I believe, for example, whether the UK participates in some of the less central bodies like UNESCO or UNIDO, those are a good indication of the extent to which the UK is prepared to work with the UN to make it better.
Speaker: Before we go on to Russia and Ukraine and your time as ambassador to the Ukraine, I just want to ask you about your time as director of the overseas territories. You mentioned your book quite a lot about that role and how how did you find the adapting to it and what were the sort of good moments, more sort of more of the bad moments during that time?
Speaker: The overseas territories are a very specialised niche corner of the Foreign Office. In fact, strictly speaking, Overseas Territories Directorate is all that remains of the Colonial Office. It's not strictly speaking foreign policy at all.
Speaker: So you're dealing with around a dozen overseas territories, populated overseas territories. There are a couple that don't have a population. to You're trying to ensure that they are well governed in the interests of their populations.
Speaker: And the tension from dealing with the overseas territories consistently comes from the fact that the elected governments of the overseas territories often don't see eye to eye with the government in London as to how they should be running their territories. To give you an example,
Speaker: Back in the 1990s and noughties, there was a dispute between London and some of the Caribbean overseas territories on whether homosexuality should be decriminalized.
Speaker: And London said it should be. Some of the overseas territories said, well, that's against our culture, that's against our history. And London forced it through. to much disquiet in those overseas territories. There will always be these great conflicts of interest between the the OTs, as we call them, and London. But at the same time, none of them want to become independent, certainly not the Caribbean overseas territories, which could become independent tomorrow if they wanted to. Places like the Turks and Caicos Islands or Montserrat or Anguilla,
Speaker: The Cayman Islands that I mentioned, they could all become independent if they wish to, or or Bermuda in the North Atlantic, but they don't want to. They see the balance of advantage as being in remaining overseas territories of the UK. And that can lead to a lot of sometimes politically very challenging, sometimes quite amusing ah relationships. I remember I mentioned in the book, for example, one occasion I went to see...
Speaker: the premier of a certain overseas territory, and i was expecting to see just him. And when I went into the meeting room, I found he'd assembled the whole cabinet of this overseas territories territory. They were all sitting on the other side of the table, and ah kind of like somebody who was on trial, and I went and sat on my side of the table.
Speaker: We had our meeting. It was um quite combative. And at the end, they suggested that we should take a group photograph. They all came round to my side of the table with their chairs, and we sat there for the group photograph.
Speaker: But it turned out that my chair, because it had been on the other side of the table, was higher than all the chairs of the... the head of government and the other ministers there. and And so a comic period of raising and lowering chairs went on until the the premier was definitely on the highest chair. And this kind of thing adds a bit of spice to life sometimes.
Speaker: As you mentioned there, Diane Lee, obviously, a sort of an area of interest for you I suppose, a vested interest is Ukraine having been ambassador. So I remember just when I joined secondary school five years ago Diane, in that first year, the ukrainian ah the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, which is so long ago, it feels like, but it's still such a pertinent and worrying issue, this war in Ukraine.
Speaker: which has been raging on now for over four years, which is extraordinary. How do you think the war will end? It's a question that perhaps is i suppose partly unanswerable, but really interesting, seeming that if we cast our minds back to 2022, most thought that Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine. However, it's been really far from that, in particular now with ah perhaps almost the tide turning towards Ukraine. So how do you think the war will end?
Speaker: I'm a bit of a pessimist about Russia's war with Ukraine, or as I call it, Putin's war on Ukraine, since I do feel that President Putin bears 99.9% responsibility for this war happening.
Speaker: as I explain in the book. And my pessimism comes from the fact that it's very difficult to see a landing zone for peace negotiations between the two sides.
Speaker: On the side of the Ukrainians, they don't want to hand over one square inch of Ukraine to Russia as a reward for Russia invading Ukraine.
Speaker: their peaceful neighbor. So they have not much motivation to reach a peace deal that involves ceding any land. On the other hand, for President Putin, who launched this war first of all, in 2014 by invading Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and then later launching a full-scale invasion in 2022, if he if he declares peace, not having reached his self-proclaimed goals of occupying the four eastern regions of Ukraine.
Speaker: How will he explain that to the Russians, that he has sacrificed, on most estimates, between 1 and 1.5 million Russians killed and seriously wounded in the last four or five years?
Speaker: he would be toast. And the whole reason he invaded Ukraine was because he feared that democracy would come from Ukraine and make his position as an authoritarian, unelected leader in Russia, more or less untenable or unelected by any reasonable measure of democracy.
Speaker: It's difficult to see a landing zone. What I've been saying really since 2022, or since the first few weeks when it became clear that Russia had miscalculated in launching its 2022 offensive, is that a long drawn out war seems the most likely outcome and one side or the other could collapse. On the one hand, Ukraine has suffered enormously. They've had an exodus of people.
Speaker: They have enormous manpower shortages in their armed forces, and their economy is literally shot to pieces. On the other hand, Russia has become increasingly weakened as the war has gone on.
Speaker: Nobody, as you said, expected that Russia would not be able to defeat Ukraine, and yet they have stumbled and stumbled again and stumbled again. And the last six months,
Speaker: It's been clear that Ukraine has gained a considerably stronger military position than they had done up to that point. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they're about to win. So what happens if neither side wins militarily? One is that one side or the other just loses the will to fight.
Speaker: And as I said, that could happen in Ukraine, but they do have home advantage. They have much higher motivation than the Russian forces. They're defending their homeland and they've seen what happens to areas of Ukraine that get occupied by Russia. There's terrible evidence of atrocities.
Speaker: Meanwhile, on the Russian side, the soldiers don't really know what they're fighting for. They're being given lots of money to persuade them to go to the front. The lifetime of Russian soldiers on the front, there's all kinds of numbers flying around, but it's clearly an extremely dangerous place to be.
Speaker: And people back... in Moscow and St. Petersburg are increasingly saying, why are we fighting this war? and President Putin has tried throughout the last four plus years since launching this disastrous campaign back in February 2022, the full-scale invasion. He's been trying to insulate the people of St. Petersburg and Moscow, who really determined the future of Russia, those central cities, to insulate them from the effects of the war, not to have mobilization that involves young people going from there to fight, not having anything to disrupt their normal lives.
Speaker: And that is becoming increasingly difficult as Ukraine develops these long-range weapons with which they are successfully attacking places as far east as Omsk,
Speaker: and even the Russian Far East with the famous Operation Spiderweb when they put these drones onto lorries and drove them to the other end of Russia. So I think if we look at the last six months, the likelihood of the Russians' willingness to fight collapsing has certainly increased. And I'm not saying the elites are about to turn on Putin or that there's going to be any kind of uprising, but the likelihood of that happening has certainly increased.
Speaker: Now, before moving on to the sort of last part of this episode, I just want to ask you about the Russian tactics of misinformation. Perhaps, how do you see them? Do you see them in the UK and the rest of Europe? And how how to best sort of counter those as young people?
Speaker: The Russian state has inherited from the Soviet Union very close attention to the control of information.
Speaker: And There has always been in the Soviet Union and now in the Russian state since President Putin took office in around 2000, a real focus both on controlling information that's available to your own people and in manipulating the and but information that's available to your enemies.
Speaker: And this is not new. There have always been ministries of propaganda. There have always been people trying to influence thinking in other countries. But what differs in the Russian approach is the scale and consistency of their misinformation efforts.
Speaker: And we've seen this again and again, the famous examples, for example, of c pro and anti-gun law demonstrations being held in the United States where people would turn up to demonstrate in favor of stronger gun controls and people turned up to to to protest against such controls and they said, well, who's organizing this? Where are the organizers? And there were no organizers. It had all been organized out of Russia.
Speaker: And the idea that Russia is wherever possible pouring petrol on the flames of any dispute within our own countries is extremely alarming.
Speaker: We see it in the recent protests against asylum seekers in the UK, where it's now been shown that a large proportion of the social media posts that were made about these protests encouraging them to take place came from outside the United Kingdom.
Speaker: What's that about? so There is a big, big problem. There's a famous, which I'd encourage all your listeners to to Google, and it's Kim Philby, none other than Kim Philby, the famous ah Soviet spy who defected to the Soviet Union.
Speaker: It's from the 1970s, and it's Kim Philby talking to a group of Stasi. The Stasi were the East German secret police, very feared, the Department for Staatssicherheit, the Stasi. And he is saying to them, if you're ever caught and interrogated, just deny everything.
Speaker: Keep denying it. Deny it, deny it, deny it. Interestingly, Kim Philby is speaking English because he never seems to have learned German or Russian, despite being a great spy. And he says, if they come up with something in your handwriting, say it's a forgery, et cetera.
Speaker: And we see this tactic being used ad nauseum by the Russian information services. For example, MH17, the Malaysian airliner shot down by a Russian book missile over eastern Ukraine in 2014. It's not that the it's not that the russians simply deny being responsible.
Speaker: They deny any responsibility whatsoever, even though it's absolutely crystal clear from evidence assembled by a Dutch court that it was Russian units that shot it down. So there is this consistency that the Russians used.
Speaker: What should you do about it? You should be really cautious about in responding to calls for action in social media. And you should be as selective as you possibly can in where you get your news from.
Speaker: ah we We see this. There's a very interesting example recently as laura luma who is who's not a household name in the UK, but she's a very influential MAGA, make America great again, influencer in the US, very close to Donald Trump.
Speaker: And she recently visited Kiev and did some amazing interviews saying, I've been wrong all this time. I thought Ukraine was full of fascists.
Speaker: I thought that Russia was justified in launching its war. I thought we shouldn't support Ukraine. I was wrong about all of these things. I was captured by Russian disinformation. Very, very interesting interviews.
Speaker: And in a way, we've all been captured by Russian disinformation. One may take this to the highest reaches of certain governments that they've been captured by Russian misinformation. And we should be aware of that risk and be appropriately cautious in forming our views.
Speaker: I wholeheartedly agree with you there. I think, mean, it's been repeatedly said by, ah mean, even the head of MI5, but there is a clear threat from Russia to the yeah UK. Not only, as you said, our political system, but our key national infrastructure is so vulnerable.
Speaker: to to Russia, to China, to hostile actors overseas. And an interesting question, which I was recently, um something I recently read about is the influence that America though has across the world. In particular, American technology with Donald Trump placing sanctions on even ah diplomatic leaders from the International Court of Justice. but He shuts down their email accounts. I didn't realize that using American technology.
Speaker: What threat do you think America poses to the world? And actually, is it that different, do you think, to the Russian or Chinese threat? How are they different? So the US has for decades or even longer been one of the closest allies of the UK, having supported us and fought with us in two major world wars many other conflicts. So they have a great history of standing by our side.
Speaker: At the same time, the US administration under President Donald Trump has made it a conscious policy to be unpredictable, to put the cat amongst the pigeons at every opportunity. We've seen this just this week with the US pulling out of long-held arms joint exercises with South Korea and President Trump suddenly praising the North Korean leader as being a friend of his and a reliable partner. This is the same North Korea with whom he totally failed to negotiate a deal in his first ah presidency and which has been supplying Russia with troops and weapons in order to attack Ukraine.
Speaker: It's that North Korea and suddenly he comes up with this statement President Trump has also been extremely critical of NATO, of the UK, of France, of Germany, of a number of countries.
Speaker: It makes running foreign policy extremely difficult. I don't ah think that the US is threatening our values and our way of life at the moment in a military way, in the way that that Russia perhaps would like to do, although I would say that President Trump's comments about Greenland are extremely concerning.
Speaker: And if the US were to make good on these threats militarily to occupy Greenland, I think we'd really be in a new dark age because we'd be in a very dangerous situation. But that hasn't happened yet. But I think the main call to action here is really that the countries of Europe need to step up their mutual military support, their structures, their support for NATO ah to increase their spending.
Speaker: and in this way to make sure that they, those European NATO members, can defend themselves, and that includes defending Ukraine, without much American help.
Speaker: It would have been almost unthinkable to say this five or ten years ago, but that's the situation we're in And it's a very tough political ask for our political leaders, people like Andy Burnham or Macron or Friedrich Merz over there in Germany, to persuade taxpayers that with all the problems we've got,
Speaker: The best thing we can spend our hard-earned tax dollar on is beefing up our armed forces to deter Russia from advancing further into Ukraine or launching other adventures. But I do think it's pretty existential now, and we should indeed be doing that. And that's going to be one of the biggest political challenges of the months and years ahead.
Speaker: Yeah, i agree with you there. We've got this amazing history of the US, as you said, but Trump is unpredictable. Moving on now to sort of some more lighthearted questions from your book.
Speaker: and One so episode that to got my attention was when the the Austrian prime minister's right hand man sort of said that you hosted every party in Vienna.
Speaker: and What is your advice now that sort of we're out of school and people are going to start hosting more and more parties? What is your advice to hosting the best party possible?
Speaker: Well, I'm a big fan of parties. I do think that one of the keys to life, apart from having fun, of course, is to build up a good set of friends and connections.
Speaker: And that's true in private life as it is in work life. And in diplomacy, it's more important than ever. And i would hesitate to lay down rules for parties because everybody is different and everybody likes different kinds of parties. I've always noticed whenever I'm giving a party, my number one concern is the music.
Speaker: I spend hours making playlists, you remember playlists, and ah getting the music ready, making sure we've got plenty of dark numbers, and of course, making sure there's limitless alcohol and has always been an important part of any party I've organized. On the other hand, I've had much-loved partners who have but wanted to focus on the food and them felt that without good food, the party is nothing, whereas for me, it's almost irrelevant.
Speaker: I think, and perhaps most important, I would say, is setting the date. I think up until you set the date, there is no party.
Speaker: Once you set the date for your party and get the invitations out, it's happening. And almost whatever you do, it's going to be great. So if you can set the date for your party, get it in everybody's diaries, then really you can't go wrong.
Speaker: And perhaps a final question then. but Amidst sort of amids the world undergoing this information revolution with ai and as you mentioned there, these unpredictable state actors, what is your advice to young people in the world of today?
Speaker: I think finding trusted information sources is going to get harder and harder. I've actually just written a novel, which unfortunately I haven't managed to sell yet, called The Rage Farm, where countries use AI to manufacture disinformation campaigns, which are so overwhelmingly powerful that you can more or less flick a switch and trigger a revolution in a country of your choice.
Speaker: And you may say that's hardly even fiction these days. But I think young people I mean, of course, as a not so young person, I could speak for hours on this subject, but young people need above all to know where they're going, to have clear goals and go for them and not to be put off by the kind of nihilistic post-COVID sense that it's all too difficult and whatever we do makes no difference. I mean, this is balls. You know, you can make a huge difference to your prospects.
Speaker: by really working like crazy and knowing where you want to get to. But in order to do that, you really need to understand the world, whether you want to be a diplomat or whether you want to do something else. And to understand the world, you need trusted information sources.
Speaker: I was looking at the Facebook feed the other day of somebody who I know well, and I was dismayed to find him saying, You know, I used to read the New York Times every day and get my information from that and take it to the coffee and read it, can't take it to the cafe and read it from cover to cover. Now I have you, my friends on Facebook. I don't know who you are, but we have such great discussions and I feel I've come to understand the world properly.
Speaker: And this guy is a raving conspiracy theorist now. and And it fills me with real despair for the future of the world that people can get so lost in this information peanut butter that we're all submerged in.
Speaker: And I think finding trusted news sources where you know who the people are and you know that they are trying their best to bring you information the situation as it really is and to discuss it is very important. I myself am a big fan of the BBC and the BBC World Service.
Speaker: I would favour doubling the money that they get as a first step towards regaining um UK influence around the world. And that would be my main advice. Focus on the best sources of information and don't get swept away in the torrents of conspiracy theorising.
Speaker: Lee, thank you so much for being our guest today. We've really enjoyed the conversation and I hope that our audience has learned a lot. If you want to learn more about Lee's experiences as a diplomat, ambassador, director of the overseas territories, do buy his book, Lessons in Diplomacy, available both in bookstores and online. It's a great read and one that I highly recommend.
Speaker: Lee, thank you again. Great. Thanks. Thanks to both of you.
