I am sorry to say I have never had much time for diplomats. Prejudice, you understand. Reading former British diplomat Carne Ross’s enjoyable and self-critical memoir – Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite – hasn’t exactly changed my mind.

But as well as reminding UK tax-payers that they could save a lot of money by flogging Britain’s embassies, Ross does call to mind some problems that we in journalism share (did that phrase “unaccountable elite” sound familiar?). Ross’s chocolate teapot elite is simply invisible (except for a very enjoyable Paul Weller anecdote – sorry, you’ll have to buy the book for the rest).

Here is Ross on the British Foreign Office’s version of “balance” – in essence summing up all my barely-suppressed suspicions about other institutions and “balance”. (Step forward the BBC.)

Debating at a staff dinner in Bonn, I had attacked a colleague for his defence of Britain’s inaction to prevent the Holocaust in WW2. This my report said, showed a tendency to go too far. My performance was duly downgraded…

It only slowly became clear to me where the boundary lay between “balance” and “going too far”. “Balance” lay in never questioning the broad thrust of what “we” wanted or were doing … to mention that there should be a moral component to policy was regarded, in the unstated and inexplicit way that a culture operates, as naive and unprofessional…

Ministers seemed to show an instinctive understanding that policy was about something more than just the allegedly-empirical world of “facts” (however dubiously derived) like states, security and interests. For “going too far” in some ways represents crossing over into the empirical world of morality.

To remain “balanced” was to choose to remain in the world of the state system, the world as it is: a world of statistics, even invented ones like Iraq’s third largest army in the world, and cold-eyed “realism”. To accept such a reductionist version of the world is to succumb to the worst kind of cynicism, where that cynicism is not even declared or admitted as such.

Anyway, there is much food for thought amid some self-excoriation and a little – for my tastes! – “going too far”. And, oh yes, never accept a Foreign Office source at face value.