Foreign Office’s brush with a new reality — and artwork

The proposal by Lord Sedwill to modernise the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) by getting rid of all those imperialist paintings has not impressed Denis MacShane, Tony Blair’s former Europe minister. MacShane recalls Robin Cook trying this in 1997, replacing a grand portrait of a fighting maharajah behind the foreign secretary’s desk with what MacShane calls a “tacky Bolton Art Gallery painting in a poor white frame” by the 1950s kitchen-sink realist John Bratby. “It was ghastly,” he says. MacShane says Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary, owed his promotion to being the only mandarin who understood theresamayspeak and worries where it might end. “They could relocate the Foreign Office to Finchley,” he shudders, “or a Thames Water branch office.”

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