There’s hope for the Foreign Office and Britain’s place in the world in this upbeat missive from an ex-ambassador.

In 1931 a French diplomat complained that “the activities of the press, and ignorance of a public that insists on being told everything, do not create an atmosphere favourable to prosecution of political designs”. This idea – that we, the public and the press, should not be told the truth – runs contrary to our understanding of open, democratic government, and yet a growing number of us have a sense that we are being deceived by our politicians. This is something Tom Fletcher acknowledges when he talks of “the decline of trust and confidence in the political class”. And yet in this, his first book, he does not see it as a crisis. At least, not yet.

Fletcher was “our man” in Lebanon from 2011 until last summer, and if you know anything about the intrigues of that country, you will appreciate that he must be extremely skilled in the art of diplomacy. He was also one of the youngest ambassadors to be appointed to represent our Britannic Majesty for some 200 years, the first western diplomat to be retweeted by the Iranian president, to have a tweetup with a diva, etc. Before Lebanon he served for four years as political secretary under Blair, Brown and Cameron. That he is a fast-track civil servant was clear the moment I met him in Beirut three years ago and I came away feeling hopeful. Anyone who has listened to politicians and diplomats dribbling platitudes on Radio 4’s Today, or BBC1’s Panorama, dodging direct questions and bluffing when a dodge fails, will know how rare that feeling of hope can be. The message of Naked Diplomacy brings more of it.

When he left Beirut, and the Foreign Office, in 2015, Fletcher wrote a farewell blog to Lebanon. Having “banged on about how digital will change diplomacy” he went on to suggest that someone write a book about how digital will also change power: “how we can marshal it to confront the threats to our existence. Now there’s an idea”.

Naked Diplomacy is that idea made flesh, a book of three very different sections. The first two draw on Fletcher’s experiences in the Foreign Office, with the first providing an overview of diplomacy, from early Chinese to Samuel Pepys, reporting how the French and Spanish ambassadors in London sought to undermine each other, to the epoch-defining Congress of Vienna, where the “great powers” of the 19th century divided the world into areas of influence and, by implication, of dominance and exploitation. It ends by listing the essential qualities of a good diplomat: tact, curiosity, courage, and the ability to get on with everyone. Honesty is not on the list.

The second section opens with a chapter titled “iDiplomacy” and looks at the transformative effects and possibilities of technology on diplomacy and on government. Here he pits the tech-savvy against what he calls the Hapless Henrys, the heirs of Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister. He writes of hard and soft power, of the effectiveness of nuclear deterrents and of how James Bond helps to promote our national interests. Some of this can sound glib – as when he suggests that “a British embassy can never have too many pictures of David Beckham on the wall” – but it helps to counter-balance the references to Aristotle and others. In case you don’t know where he is leading, he spells it out by describing a British ambassador of the near future, championing human rights and civil society, looking out for the safety of British citizens, promoting British business. This ideal ambassador will be “lobbyist, leader, communicator, pioneer, entrepreneur, activist, campaigner, advocate” and, most importantly, will not be a career diplomat.

All this is important, even if it is something most of us have been excluded from: when Fletcher spoke of “we”, he was referring to diplomats. But in the last section of the book, “we” is us, you and me – and him. Instead of an argument for the need to rethink how the foreign service is run, Naked Diplomacy becomes a call for us all to reconsider our place in society and in our interconnected world. It urges us to be brave, creative, involved and connected. Diplomacy, he insists, is too important to be left to diplomats and he calls on us “citizen diplomats” to engage with it, to wield power. This again might seem glib but I think he is serious about wanting more public involvement. As the pages turned, I thought this read increasingly as a new manifesto, and I finished it thinking how unsurprised I would be if Fletcher ended up running the Foreign Office, or the country.

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