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Foreign policy
An effort to unite Britain's diplomatic and aid corps has not gone well at all
Mergers almost always go wrong. Investors, rightly, worry when a corporate one is announced. Combining two organisations, their differing goals, incompatible it systems and management structures, at best causes headaches. It always proves expensive. Cultures clash. People get distracted. According to the Harvard Business Review, 70-90% of mergers and acquisitions (m&a) deals fail. The only surprise is that the figure isn't higher.
The prospects were thus never great for a tie-up between the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (fco) and the Department for International Development (Dfid), which got under way in 2020. On one side was the diplomatic service, with lots of staff and an annual budget of some £2.4bn ($3.ibn). On the other was DfiD, with fewer staff but a budget roughly four times bigger. Cultures differed starkly. As one former official noted, the choice of footwear said it all: hardnosed diplomats showed up to meetings in smart office shoes; the bleeding hearts in sandals or trainers.
The success, or not, of the expanded Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (fcdo) has taken on totemic significance as Britain seeks a global role post-Brexit. To some, like Simon McDonald, who led the diplomatic service until 2020, it will let a fading power speak with one voice abroad. In his vision, other agencies, such as the Department for International Trade, could one day be wrapped in. To others, the deal was a hostile takeover by right-wingers bent on gutting the development corps. Awkwardly, Andrew Mitchell, who was brought in last year as the minister for development and Africa, had been in the second camp: he had previously called the merger a "self-inflicted act of vandalism".
Three years on, which side has been proved right? The success of an m&a deal is judged mostly on whether the two groups are doing their work better after the tie-up than before. On this score the fcdo has been struggling.