In or Out? If in doubt, ask Palmerston, the new mouser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. BuzzFeed, the news site that specialises in feline clickbait, recently did just that. Flummoxed by the cat’s inability to speak human and yet in search of guidance on the referendum, the interviewer was helped out by a “government official” who reckoned that Palmerston was a Remainer. The Battersea cattery graduate was thus perfectly in tune with the whole of the Foreign Office establishment, which now buys into the idea of the EU and the use of pooled sovereignty to solve the problems of the future.

The department needs to shake off this institutional bias. Brexit or no Brexit, the Foreign Office is going to have to find new ways of dealing with 21st-century dilemmas. The projection of British power has rarely been so complex, the resources available so meagre, the sense of national interest so blurred. If we’re Out, then we will have to build new allies, be faster on our feet, aim for special relationships with India and (more dubiously) with China, train up a legion of trade negotiators. Vladimir Putin calculates we might even have to make our peace with him.

If we’re In, our diplomats will have to fight against our inevitable slippage down the EU pecking order. We won’t be able to bang the big bass drum in Brussels any more. A leader cannot threaten to walk out of the EU to improve his sales pitch before a referendum and then spend the campaign claiming that Brexit is the road to perdition. As far as Brussels is concerned, the government’s credibility has been shot to pieces. Germany, and even stumbling France, know this. After their respective elections next year, they will renew their historical axis, tighten the EU — and Britain will be treated as the slowest boat in the convoy.

So this is a turning point for British diplomacy, the toughest test since the early 1990s when Europe was having to deal with the collapse of communist rule, the expansion of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and a raging war in the Balkans. Those were the days when we were in the vanguard in tackling the bloodshed in Bosnia. Nowadays the EU peace-broking on Ukraine is conducted by France and Germany and we have struggled to take a seat in the front row.

British diplomacy within the EU has become a languid affair. The kind of engagement that saw John Kerr (then British ambassador to the EU) hide under the tablecloth scribbling cribs for John Major at the Maastricht dinner is unthinkable. The obstructionism, the grinding machinery of consensus building, has slowed down our thought processes, made us lazy.

In Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey advises his minister on the available responses to a bellicose statement by a foreign statesman: do nothing, issue a statement, prepare an official protest, cut off aid, declare war. The dulling of our senses within the EU means that we rarely get beyond the Issuing a Statement stage. Even that is regarded as a triumph over our Do Nothing partner states.

Britain has to emancipate itself from this, whatever happens on June 23. First, it has to change the balance between diplomacy and development aid. The Foreign Office, with more than 160 missions abroad, is run on barely £650 million a year. The budget for the Department for International Development is close to £12 billion; aid just to Pakistan and Ethiopia easily trumps the FCO allocation. The tail is wagging the dog. Diplomacy has to become again the primary tool for re-modelling Britain’s position in the world.

There is no point in arguing for more cash, however, unless you know what to do with it. The former ambassador to Beirut, Tom Fletcher, argues that diplomacy has to catch up with the communications revolution. He asks: who will have most influence on the 21st century, Google or Britain? Most people will say Google, but there is nothing inevitable about that. It is a matter of recognising and phasing out the largely defunct: the cocktail parties that are no longer an efficient way of gathering or trading information, the time-wasting diplomatic protocol that can be replaced by text messages or crisp emails. Embassies should no longer be defined by grand buildings with sweeping staircases but by the ability to place their government at the centre of networks of influence.

This could be the beginning of a revolution, starting with an overhaul of the FCO’s notoriously sluggish IT systems and raising the standards of diplomats. Under-perfomers should be let go, Mr Fletcher says, rather than tolerated. Those who have been sent on year-long courses in hard languages such as Arabic and Mandarin need to be able to demonstrate not only that they can skim the local newspapers but also cope with tough grillings on host nation television and comment fluently on Twitter and Facebook.

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