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Lord Chalfont tells a story about his days as a Junior Minister in the Foreign Office. He attended a very grand dinner party, and spotted a lady standing alone in a long red dress. The besotted Chalfont staggered across to ask if she would waltz with him. The lady drew herself up: "I will not waltz with you for three reasons. First this is not a waltz, it is the Czech national anthem. Second, you are drunk. My third and greatest objection is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Prague".

- Auberon Waugh, Diaries (2 May 1976)

The story could well be authentically true. A variation of this story was more usually told about Lord Chalfont’s then boss, the Foreign Secretary George Brown in Prime Minister in Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s. Chalfont - born Alun Gwynn Jones - was a decorated soldier (a Military Cross recipient due to his bravery in action and especially a hand-to-hand firefight with communist guerrillas in Malaysia in 1957) and a notable defence correspondent with the London Times before being tapped for Defence Minister in 1964 by Harold Wilson. He was placed in charge of Britain’s negotiations to join the European Common Market. An ancillary task was to prevent the frequently inebriated foreign secretary George Brown from embarrassing the government.

George Brown is long forgotten figure in British politics but in those days he was notorious as Harold Wilson’s drunk and touchy Deputy Prime Minister. He was always falling over and/or shooting his mouth off. He had a long standing drinking problem that was obvious whenever the made television appearances. Brown, indeed, once boasted that, “Many members of parliament drink and womanise - now, I've never womanised.”

Chalfont was the source of the famous story of Brown requesting a dance from a scarlet-clad figure at a reception who turned out to be a cardinal. Only in this telling it was a ball where the Peruvian national anthem was being played and not a waltz and it was the archbishop of Lima that the drunkenly Brown asked for a dance. It was this latter story which - fanned by Chalfont and others - which became apocryphal amongst Foreign Office diplomats and the diplomatic dinner circuit for decades to come. Whatever the truth it’s a stonking good story to break the ice at any dinner party.

Photo: George Brown, British Foreign Secretary, showing his diplomartic moves on the dance floor, 1967.

David Cameron U.K. Foreign Secretary

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Former Prime Minister David Cameron has returned to politics and is now the UK Foreign Secretary.

He quit No10 in 2016 after losing the Brexit referendum and basically causing all the instability we've had since then.

Now he's back, as part of 'change' candidate Rishi Sunak's top team, which is incidentally all male again.

All 4 great Offices of State are held by men.

The UK is a Black Mirror episode what the fuck is going on

Fuck Priti Patel.

• Mossadegh media: newspaper & magazine articles, editorials

What?

Someone who left the government because of the most ridiculous decision in recent history -- a decision that fucked up our relations with our most important foreign ally and our most important trading partner no less -- has been made FOREIGN SECRETARY????

I mean.......... what?

✦ Diplomacy ✦

[ALT Text: David Cameron returns to UK government as foreign secretary]

presumably david cameron has only just realised he left his child in the foreign secretarys office [x]

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New foreign secretary James Cleverly is really into Warhammer

The new UK Foreign Secretary has been outed as a Warhammer 40k player.

I don’t know whether to be happy and proud, or embarrassed and horrified that he’s one us.

As long as he recognises that The Imperium of Man is supposed to be satirical and doesn’t use it for official UK foreign policy...