Sir Julian Thornycroft

Foreign Secretary, risen from the paper, bonded-storage and maritime-commercial world rather than a diplomatic dynasty, who treats treaties as instruments whose transport, insurance and delay clauses matter as much as their ceremony.

Sir Julian Thornycroft is Foreign Secretary and carries the realm’s foreign business within the present ministry; the Prime Minister depends upon him for a foreign policy the King can defend. He came to the office out of the paper, bonded-storage and maritime-commercial world rather than from a diplomatic dynasty, and he has never pretended otherwise.

He treats treaties as instruments. Their transport, insurance, enforcement and delay clauses matter to him as much as their ceremonial language, and older diplomats complain that he asks what a treaty will do to freight before asking what it will do to dignity. The King likes him for exactly that reason. Foreign envoys find him courteous and exhausting; merchants trust him more than they trust most men in his office.

Beyond his ministry his name leads a life of its own in the City. In one older counting hall his likeness looks down upon the clerks, who say of him that a delayed receipt would shame him more than a duel; and in the paper streets he is called upon whenever disciplined service to money and to record must be made to sound honourable. His published observations on court and city are of the same unsentimental eye. In the upper city, he writes, what is to be learned is access itself, which is to say who may get in to see whom.

Companies meet his office when an errand crosses a border or a treaty: an embassy escort, a disputed consignment under foreign seal, the recovery of papers a counterpart would prefer lost. They find his instructions unusually precise about carriage, insurance and dates, and much less concerned with ceremony. His clerks will want receipts.

In person

Slim and formal, Sir Julian is a man in his fifties with light brown hair going grey, neatly parted, a neat moustache, and a long, refined face that suggests a merchant more readily than a courtier. He wears a dark formal diplomatic suit without flourish, and his desk carries treaty folders, maritime maps, a globe and freight and insurance papers rather than presentation gifts. His courtesy is constant and his attention to detail relentless.