A British diplomat shares lessons on leadership gained over his expansive career. 

Simon McDonald argues that we should reflect on the nature and strategies of leadership before entering a leadership role, and we should look to examples of others to help us in shaping our own approaches.

Over nearly four decades in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service, McDonald worked for four permanent under-secretaries and a dozen senior ambassadors before becoming a permanent under-secretary himself and leading the Service—which has over 14,000 staff members in 270 countries—for five years. He also worked directly for six foreign secretaries and under five prime ministers. Observing these people undertaking such important and difficult work, McDonald saw the behaviors which helped them achieve their objectives, as well as those which hindered them.

In this book, McDonald synthesizes the skills he’s learned through his many years working in diplomacy, offering an insightful contribution amid heightening debates over the leadership of the United Kingdom. Considering the future of British leadership, he makes a case for the reform of the monarchy, the cabinet, civil service, and, in particular, the House of Lords, of which he has been a member since 2021.
 

Harry Parkes was at the heart of Britain’s relations with the Far East from the start of his working life at fourteen, to his death at fifty-seven. Orphaned at the age of five, he went to China on his own as a child and worked his way to the top. God-fearing and fearless, he believed his mission was to bring trade and ‘civilisation’ to East Asia. In his day, he was seen as both a hero and a monster and is still bitterly resented in China for his part in the country’s humiliations at Western hands, but largely esteemed in Japan for helping it to industrialise. Morton’s new biography, the first in over thirty years, and benefiting in part from access to the Parkes’ family and archives, offers a more intimate and informed profile of the personal and professional life of a Victorian titan and one of Britain’s most undiplomatic diplomats in the history of the British Civil Service.