In celebrating the achievements of Zara Steiner, this chapter seeks to thread through a number of aspects of the British diplomatic world since 1815, a world on which together we have shared and share ideas and projects. Its focus is on some of the ways in which, despite external pressures for change, the Foreign Office and diplomatic service retained and protected well into the twentieth century many styles and patterns of behaviour established during the previous century.

After the Foreign Office and diplomatic service were amalgamated in 1919, it was soon clear that the ostensibly merged service had assumed most of the traditions and practices of the latter. Successive governments since 1945 have continued, sometimes somewhat reluctantly, to tolerate and accept the justification for such traditions and practices, even after the harsh review in 1977 by Kenneth Berrill's Central Policy Review Staff investigation. This acceptance, and the consequent associated financing, have ensured the survival within the diplomatic service of a sense of distinctiveness within the civil service. That sense of distinctiveness has in its turn helped to perpetuate those traditions and practices. Sir David Kelly even went so far as to assert that, when he joined the diplomatic service, ‘it was regarded as part of the King's Household and not really part of the Civil Service at all’. The series of investigations, which began in 1962 with the Plowden inquiry, have all with different emphasis focused and continue to focus on the benefits and disadvantages of the distancing of the service from the home civil service.