The Great Offices of State, BBC Two

That title has been troubling me. The Great Offices of State is so stolid and dull, like an illustrated Ladybird children’s book from the 1950s - The Flags of the Commonwealth, or some such. And then you start trying to think of alternatives, a play on Yes, Minister perhaps, and you soon see that this flippancy wouldn't do justice to what is in fact a masterful achievement - the sort of television series that will (or should) be shown in schools and universities for years to come. Perhaps they should have simply called it Another Political Documentary Series by the Great Michael Cockerell, which would have been quite enough to secure my attendance.

Cockerell is that priceless commodity in a blogged-out world, the extremely well-informed specialist journalist who is trusted enough by those in power, and former power, to be granted generous and relaxed access, and trusted enough by the viewer not to pay the price for that access by biting his tongue. He knows the precise questions to ask, as in last night’s film about the Foreign Office, in which he quizzed a succession of former Foreign Secretaries about whether MI6 routinely spied on our allies in the European Union. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn't, say, although Douglas Hurd came closest to an admission when he said that “Let’s put it this way - I wasn’t left in ignorance.”

MI6 seems to be a parasitical entity dependent on the good health of the Foreign Office (apparently a regular FO enquiry about the secret service was the wonderfully Smileyesque “What do our friends think?”), in which case they must be very worried indeed. For the drift of Cockerell’s film was that after a succession of wars - from Suez to Iraq by way of the Falklands - in which the Foreign Office was bypassed by Downing Street, the grandiose buildings in Whitehall are but a hollow shell.

Foreign Office mandarins are genetically opposed to the bloodshed and expense of war, and this was always going to cause problems with “destiny Prime Ministers” like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, both of whom employed their own foreign policy advisers, the brothers Charles and Jonathan Powell respectively (oddly, the siblings pronounce their surnames in different ways). Thatcher once described the department as a “hotbed of cold feet”, and watching them drafting one of their endless European Union communiqués, debating the relative merits of the words “declaration” or “decision”, it is easy to understand the lady’s impatience.

Cockerell’s film began with a rather self-satisfied epigram, seemingly well polished by regular outings, from the former diplomat Lord Renwick, who said that “the Foreign Office regards the arrival of each new minister like an oyster regards the arrival of a grain of sand... the intrusion of an irritant with a very low statistical probability of ever producing a pearl”. When it comes to Downing Street, it seems, the process of producing Foreign Office pearls is far too slow and painstaking a process to be bothered with.

Anyway I preferred the spontaneous bitching that spoke of still open wounds from the Thatcher era, as when Geoffrey Howe likened his boss’s approach to Europe to being married to a clergyman who suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God. “I should think it probably took him five years to think of that phrase,” replied Charles (now Lord) Powell, as if dusting a stray hair from his jacket.

But perhaps nothing spoke more eloquently of the decline of the Foreign Office’s - and indeed Britain’s - standing in the world than the sight of its shiny newish minister of state, David Miliband, looking for all the world like an eager young middle-manager for a pharmaceutical company, as he stared down from the same windows from which Lord Grey, on the eve of the First World War, watched the lights go out all over Europe. An early Miliband initiative? To distribute a booklet to all our diplomatic posts abroad, including peel-off stickers to encourage good work by staff with slogans like “Good Job”, “Job Well Done” and “That Was Great”. Give Michael Cockerell all three of those.