Service in Diplomatic Residence
A diplomatic residence is two houses at once. It is the private home of the head of mission and their family, and it is the public face of a state in a foreign capital. The staff who serve such a house live within both lives, and the quality of their work is measured by how invisibly they pass between them.
Service in a diplomatic residence is, in its working hours, indistinguishable from service in any great private house. The principals must be cared for, the rooms must be in order, the rhythm of breakfast and bath and the morning post must continue without remark. What distinguishes the diplomatic residence is what occurs before and after these private hours: the slow, methodical preparation for representation, and the equally slow restoration of the house to private use the morning after.
A national day reception, a working dinner for an opposition leader, a quiet supper for a visiting minister, a children's tea for the school of the host country, the call by a delegation that arrives with three hours' notice: each of these makes a different demand on the house. The staff who serve a diplomatic residence well are those who have learned, over years, that none of these moments is ordinary, and none of them requires improvisation either. Each has its established form. The work is to find the form quickly, and to inhabit it without strain.
The continuity of the house
Heads of mission rotate. The residence does not. The most valuable staff in any embassy residence are often those who have served three or four ambassadors and who carry, in their working memory, the operating culture of the house. They know which suppliers have served the mission for thirty years. They know which rooms are used for which kinds of meeting and why. They know which neighbours expect a card on which feast day. None of this is written down. All of it matters.
When we are asked to advise on the staffing of a diplomatic residence, our first counsel is almost always to protect this institutional memory. New ambassadors arrive with their own preferences and their own pace. They are entitled to both. But the residence belongs, in a quiet sense, to the long-serving staff as much as to any single principal, and a transition that respects this fact is the transition that succeeds.
Discretion of a particular kind
The discretion required of staff in a diplomatic residence is of a particular kind. It is not only the discretion of the great private household, which protects the personal life of the family. It is, in addition, the discretion of an institution that may at any time host conversations of national significance. A guest who pauses in the morning room to take a private call is doing the work of his country. The footman who passes through at that moment passes through, and afterwards has heard nothing. This is understood. It is not negotiated. It is simply the condition of the work.
Candidates who have served only in private houses sometimes arrive at a residence with the assumption that discretion is a matter of personal honour alone. It is more than that. It is, in this setting, a matter of state. The candidates we present to diplomatic households are briefed plainly on this point before any introduction is made, and the households themselves are encouraged to repeat the briefing in their own terms upon arrival. There can be no ambiguity here.
The pleasure of the work
It would be wrong to give the impression that service in a diplomatic residence is solemn throughout. Some of the most accomplished butlers and chefs of our acquaintance have spent their working lives in such houses, and they speak of the work with affection. The variety of guests, the nightly recomposition of the dining room, the quiet pride of seeing the national flag raised on a feast day, the friendships formed with colleagues across other missions in the same capital: these are pleasures of a particular kind, available in no other setting.
Our office is privileged to advise a number of foreign ministries and ambassadors on the recruitment, training, and continuity of their residence staff. We do so quietly, by long-standing arrangement, and we treat each residence as the singular institution that it is. There is no template for the work. There is only the patient labour of finding the right person for the right house, and of holding open the line of communication for as long as the appointment endures.