LONDON: A senior British diplomat of Indian origin has resigned from the British Foreign Office, criticizing it for being woke, full of paper merchants and underperformers and putting the “cult of international law” above national security.In an article in the British newspaper The Times titled “The Foreign Office is failing to put Britain first,” Amir Kotecha wrote: “Our impotence on Iran and our cowardly capitulation over Chagos occurs when the long-term national interest is sacrificed to the absolute worship of international law, the demands of vociferous activist groups, or the appeasement of sectarian voting blocs.”He called for a “tougher focus on what benefits the British people” and said that the government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s slowness to act on Iran influenced his decision to resign.
He told the UK Times: “Instead of making a clear-eyed and sober assessment of what is in the national interest and what is good for the UK, we are instead letting our entire foreign policy be dictated by what lawyers tell us international law requires. I am ashamed to serve this government, so I have decided to give up.”Kotecha, an Oxford University graduate, resigned from his position at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv last month.
He said: “If the Civil Service was once a Rolls-Royce, it is now a battered hatchback driven by someone with suspicious vision and an intense dislike of driving. Our country will not get back on track until the car and driver are roadworthy again.”He said that on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, he was invited to an event marking World African Day (celebrating African poetry) and this week, as the war raged in the Middle East, the top stories on the State Department intranet were about “taking charge of development.”“In discussions about how the State Department can improve productivity using AI, some colleagues were more interested in environmental impact assessments,” he said, adding that some colleagues worked from home because they “didn’t want to work in a colonial office building.”
