Oct 1, 2026 · 13 min · 6 segments
How did I get into the British diplomatic service after one of the most disastrous interviews of all time? I really made a mess of it! For more about real-life diplomacy and the nuts and bolts of…
Leigh TurnerHost
There's a lot of memoirs and how-to guides that seem to suggest that the people who are writing them never made any mistakes.
But despite all sorts of diplomatic balls-ups and errors and, quite frankly, embarrassments, I did eventually have a reasonable diplomatic career.
So how did that happen, and how did I get into the Foreign Office in the first place after one of the most disastrous interviews of all time? Back in 1978, in my final year in Cambridge, I applied myself to looking for a job, and I thought, "Should I apply for the diplomatic service, the British diplomatic service?" It seemed kind of out of my reach, to be honest, but I thought, "Why not have a go?" So I applied, and in January 1979, I had to take the civil service entrance exams.
Amazingly, I got a good enough mark to go on to the next stage of the process, which was the Civil Service Selection Board.
This process is still very similar today, although the civil service exams have been replaced at the beginning by an online exercise, the famous in-tray exercise, and the Civil Service Selection Board is called something else.
Amazingly, I got through the Civil Service Selection Board as well, which included all sorts of strange exercises where you had to chair meetings and people had to vote on which members of the competition they would like to be on a desert island with, and there were all sorts of intelligence tests and interviews with psychologists and so on and so on.
And then in spring 1979, I was invited to attend the Final Selection Board in London.
To put this in context, at that time, there was still a Labour government, and Margaret Thatcher was the leader of the Conservative Party in opposition, and there was going to be a general election in May 1979.
So in the spring of 1979, before this happened, I was invited to London to the Final Selection Board, and I was still at Cambridge University, a pretty naive, pretty inexperienced person when I look back at things.
And I remember asking all my friends, "What is the Final Selection Board? What does it consist of?" This was years before the internet, of course, and I asked around, and several people who'd done the Final Selection Board said to me, "Look, it's a piece of cake.
If you've got through the entrance exams and you've got through the Civil Service Selection Board, you're as good as in.
There's a lot of memoirs and how-to guides that seem to suggest that the people who are writing them never made any mistakes.
But despite all sorts of diplomatic balls-ups and errors and, quite frankly, embarrassments, I did eventually have a reasonable diplomatic career.
So how did that happen, and how did I get into the Foreign Office in the first place after one of the most disastrous interviews of all time? Back in 1978, in my final year in Cambridge, I applied myself to looking for a job, and I thought, "Should I apply for the diplomatic service, the British diplomatic service?" It seemed kind of out of my reach, to be honest, but I thought, "Why not have a go?" So I applied, and in January 1979, I had to take the civil service entrance exams.
Amazingly, I got a good enough mark to go on to the next stage of the process, which was the Civil Service Selection Board.
This process is still very similar today, although the civil service exams have been replaced at the beginning by an online exercise, the famous in-tray exercise, and the Civil Service Selection Board is called something else.
Amazingly, I got through the Civil Service Selection Board as well, which included all sorts of strange exercises where you had to chair meetings and people had to vote on which members of the competition they would like to be on a desert island with, and there were all sorts of intelligence tests and interviews with psychologists and so on and so on.
And then in spring 1979, I was invited to attend the Final Selection Board in London.
To put this in context, at that time, there was still a Labour government, and Margaret Thatcher was the leader of the Conservative Party in opposition, and there was going to be a general election in May 1979.
So in the spring of 1979, before this happened, I was invited to London to the Final Selection Board, and I was still at Cambridge University, a pretty naive, pretty inexperienced person when I look back at things.
And I remember asking all my friends, "What is the Final Selection Board? What does it consist of?" This was years before the internet, of course, and I asked around, and several people who'd done the Final Selection Board said to me, "Look, it's a piece of cake.
If you've got through the entrance exams and you've got through the Civil Service Selection Board, you're as good as in.
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