Annemarie van Gaal is not impressed with the Dutch diplomatic service but even less so with the ‘wise men’ who evaluated it. 

Imagine you want an evaluation of your business and you ask five experienced and expensive consultants to do the job. More than a year later they come up with this impressive conclusion: you have to modernise.

The thing is they don’t really know how much this would cost, and what this modernisation would achieve financially is, unfortunately, also an unknown. Would you be prepared to pay their huge bill?

Dinner party

Last week former senior civil servant Arthur Docters van Leeuwen and his self-styled Group of Wise Men presented ‘Modernising diplomacy’, a report on the future of our embassies.

I have quite a bit of experience dealing with embassies and I’m not impressed with their level of efficiency. I think diplomats lead a privileged existence and spend their time in semi-conscious suspension between one dinner party and the next. The job requires no in-depth knowledge or problem-solving abilities and why should it? Diplomats never last longer than a couple of years in one post. One of the things the wise men point out is that diplomats spends a lot of time paving the way for the next appointment.

How odd is it to call yourself ‘wise’? Isn’t it up to other people to bestow the compliment? In this case Docters Van Leeuwen et al creepily sign the report as the ‘Group of Wise Men’. Who puts these committees together anyway? This one was made up of two senior civil servants, a former ambassador, someone who’s been a politician all her life and the director of the institute that has been training diplomats for years. I agree with a lot the committee has found, especially its conclusion: ‘the present model of diplomatic representations is not future-proof’.

Lack

Let’s see, that’s €0.5bn a year we’re spending on a non-future-proof diplomatic service. The committee proposes a ‘network organisation’ and a ‘modernised embassy net’. So far, so good, but then the wise men go on to say the service needs more money ‘because the modernisation programme will require some investment’. The committee lacks the necessary data ‘for the extent of the financial consequences of a modernisation programme.’

The benefits of all this modernising are also unclear because of  ‘a lack of available facts to support an estimate’ of such benefits.’ Which is why the committee recommends an ‘estimation of the costs and a cost-benefit study’. And that’s it.

What a useless conclusion that is. Entrepreneurs couldn’t afford a half-baked proposal such as the wise men have formulated because soon they wouldn’t have any business left. I propose that the next committee is made up of a more diverse group of wise people.

Annemarie van Gaal is an entrepreneur. She is head of AM Publishing and is a writer and a television personality.