Trade Envoys: Cheap, Effective Diplomacy Or Patronage-Fuelled Freebie Fest?

Trade envoys (Illustration by Tracy Worrall)

Sienna Rodgers

@siennamarla

“It doesn’t go on your register of interests, you get treated like a minister, and you get a civil servant.” Becoming one of the United Kingdom’s trade envoys is living the dream for a back bencher – or at least that is how this MP sees it.

The trade envoy programme is a network of parliamentarians who are appointed by the Prime Minister from the back benches to support ministers in boosting trade with particular countries assigned to them. Launched under David Cameron in 2012, with a first round of just eight envoys, the scheme has grown and under this government now boasts 32 envoys covering 79 markets across six continents.

“The Civil Service didn’t like it, of course, because they thought they were very good at doing trade, which they weren’t”

“The reason I started it was because trade business is a long-term thing, and you need continuity, and you need to be able to do it at times required rather than at times available,” explains Lord Marland, the Conservative peer and former minister who came up with the idea. Under Cameron, he served as the prime minister’s trade envoy, overseeing all the individual envoys, in a full-time but unpaid role.

“The Civil Service didn’t like it, of course, because they thought they were very good at doing trade, which they weren’t. Civil servants change jobs every three years, as do ambassadors, as do ministers. What I wanted was continuity, so that for five years at least, you had a person who was your point of contact over here, of a senior nature.”

“The idea was that they would lead trade delegations, and that the people who were trade envoys were significant people – the original ones were people like David Puttnam,” Marland says, referring to film producer Lord Puttnam who retired from the Lords in 2021. “I wanted impact players, if you know what I mean: they knew their way around the world, and they could go at any time.”

That was the plan, but things have changed since then – not for the better, says Marland. “It got politicised by various prime ministers, in that they wanted to reward back bench MPs with the task. Of course, it then started getting watered down, because back bench MPs can’t go at any time, they have to be [in Parliament] to vote, they have to be there to deal with their constituency, they can only really go in school holidays, so that’s not as effective. And of course, they don’t have the stature of some of the people…”

It did not take long for the programme to devolve into a distraction for back benchers, according to Marland, who says this politicisation started under Cameron, in his second term. The envoys are now typically seen as a tool not only of economic diplomacy but also of party management: they are a cheap way of keeping back benchers busy and loyal.

“When I stopped being trade minister, Liam Fox gave me a job, which was kind of him, but I think it was more keeping me happy I’d been sacked than anything else. You know how bitter we get,” jokes Conservative MP Mark Garnier, who was a trade envoy before and after serving as a trade minister under Theresa May. He also helped run the programme, which operates as a unit within the Department for Business and Trade.

What criteria are used to choose envoys? “MPs who would otherwise be difficult if they weren’t given jobs, if I’m being very cynical about it. If you’re Keir Starmer, you’ve got 400 MPs – what are you going to do with all of them?” Garnier replies.

The trade envoys are supposed to be a cross-party group, but May was criticised for appointing too many of her own, and Starmer has just one Tory, one non-affiliated and one Lib Dem, with Labour MPs and peers filling the other 28 spots. And, while unpaid, like parliamentary private secretaries the envoys belonging to the ruling party can be treated as an extension of the payroll vote.

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Northover, who was a trade envoy to Angola from 2016 and added Zambia in 2017, was not happy when the “excellent” envoy to Ethiopia, Jeremy Lefroy, was sacked from his post for voting against Sunday trading, she says.

“It shouldn’t have been tangled up in all of that. He was reappointed later, but he was incredibly thorough and effective and good, and so that seemed inappropriate to us.”

So, why would a parliamentarian take up this unpaid role? “There are two answers to that,” says Garnier. “There’s a very cynical answer. But the very positive answer is that you don’t go into politics because you want to get a load of freebies, you go into politics because you want to make a bit of a difference.”

On the scale between America and Tuvalu exists a “marzipan layer” of economies, as the Wyre Forest MP puts it, where there are “potentially quite healthy levels of trade you could do with these countries, but not enough ministers going through them to be able to open trade-related doors or help promote Britain”. This is where the envoys come in.

Like most envoys, Garnier had a link to his assigned countries (Thailand, Myanmar and Brunei, and later Vietnam too): as a former specialist Asian investment banker, he was reminded of the opportunity he found in those countries back in the 80s, and so “piled into it with enthusiasm”.

Northover had been an Africa international development minister in the Coalition. “For me, it was absolutely complementary to the kind of development work that I’d done before,” she says, describing proudly how she brought in the first UK export finance support into Angola, building a major mother-and-baby hospital through it, and persuaded Angola to raise money on the London Stock Exchange.

One of her early tasks was to help British companies that were struggling to get money owed to them by Angola: “Here was a country which wanted to rise up the tables of the ease of doing business, wanted to bring in foreign investment, and so they needed to be settling these bills to the British companies. We managed to clear it all off – all those debts.”

“There was one who didn’t like to fly. Well, what’s the point of that?”

Northover describes how the civil servant from the Department of International Trade, as it then was, would be specific about what she needed to secure from her meetings, whether it was contacts or information: “I was moved like a chess piece.”

“He had a very, very clear plan as to what needed to happen,” she says of her “handler”, as Garnier calls the trade official assigned to each envoy. “Then I would come back to Britain, and he would run with the various things that we had managed to secure. The American ambassador there said it was rather like smoke and mirrors – a very effective but incredibly reasonably priced way of doing this.”

Smoke and mirrors? “They always assumed that I was in close cahoots with the Queen, in the country in question. ‘How was she?’ and stuff,” she explains, laughing.

The Lib Dem peer believes the work of envoys is highly valuable, clearly, but she adds: “A lot depends upon the individuals doing it, and if they come at it as ‘this is really an interesting opportunity’, as opposed to, ‘I would rather be doing something else’.

“There was one who didn’t like to fly. Well, what’s the point of that? That person probably shouldn’t have taken that position. That was not much use.” Did they ever visit their country? “I don’t think they did, no,” she replies, though will not reveal who it was.

Fabian Hamilton, the Labour MP who has been made trade envoy to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, has similarly found his dedicated civil servant to be “extremely good, very bright and very on it”. The official from the trade envoy unit in the Department of Business and Trade sorts out the parliamentarian’s diary and offers general support.

But Garnier reports that envoys can be constrained – such as by the need to avoid treading on toes when dealing with diplomats.

When he was trade envoy to the US, the MP says: “Kim Darroch was the ambassador then, and I don’t think he particularly liked politicians. He didn’t want to have a trade envoy in his patch – he wanted to do trade negotiations on the Hill.

“Originally it was about moving forward in the trade negotiations, and then it turned out that we would upset the Foreign Office too much if we came in there. So, the Civil Service took control of the political agenda – again.”

Instead, he spent his time in the 30 states that were not Washington and had not been visited by ministers. It was “interesting”, he reports, but the budget of £10,000 a year was “too small to be worthwhile”.

“You’ve got to make sure you don’t do anything stupid. It’s quite easy, if you’re hungover or drunk after lunch... you could cause a diplomatic incident”

There have been criticisms of the cost incurred by envoys. When Labour’s Chris Bryant was Standards Committee chair, he asked for transparency on travel costs (£232,325 for 2023/24), and argued there was “a great deal of murkiness” around the programme.

MPs do not declare their envoy trips on their MPs’ register of interests – it is more akin to a ministerial visit, and yet they are not ministers.

“If you’re a trade envoy, you’re obviously not being paid for by the government of Thailand, you’re being paid by the British government, but trade envoys: do they have a financial interest in this or not? It’s one of these grey areas,” remarks Garnier.

“If it’s a quasi-ministerial role, it’s exactly the same as the ministerial code, but it falls between quite a lot of stools – outside the ministerial code, and outside the MPs’ register of interests. It’s interesting: one of these glorious fudges which has not been resolved but somebody could kick up a fuss about it. I think if anything they should draw it more under the ministerial code.”

Hamilton notes of his upcoming visit to Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, where he will meet with trade bodies, chambers of commerce, politicians and possibly some large corporations, that: “To save money, I’ll be staying at the residence of our ambassadors in Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción.”

Asked about these trips, which are expected of envoys at least twice a year, non-affiliated peer Baroness Hoey, who served as envoy to Ghana from 2021 until this year, replies: “I hate that word, ‘trip’. It sounds like you’re going off to have a sunbathing expedition. The point of it is not to necessarily travel that much. Probably, I went twice a year… You would have a very tightly knit programme, and you would never stay more than three days.

“I’ve got a busy life, as a member of the House of Lords. I wouldn’t have wanted to be swanning around somewhere without a purpose. It wouldn’t have been worth my while. But I can’t speak for all trade envoys.”

There are dangers as an envoy, Garnier warns – the stakes are higher than one might assume. “You’ve got to make sure you don’t do anything stupid. It’s quite easy, if you’re hungover or drunk after lunch or something, and say something rude to the prime minister or minister, you could cause a diplomatic incident. So, you’ve got to behave yourself.”

That does not seem a wholly unlikely prospect. Asked for an anecdote from his time as envoy, Garnier recalls: “I had a very fun evening once, when I bumped into the Mexican ambassador and the Spanish chargé d’affaires in the tequila bar in Bangkok – the start of a great joke. They taught me how to drink tequila properly.”

One should not be licking salt before taking a shot, the MP helpfully relays to The House, as this angers the experts. Instead: “You take the shot, you kiss the edge of the glass, you get the tiniest spread of tequila on your lips and tongue, and it burns. You wait a couple of minutes, do it again, and it burns slightly less. Your lips and your tongue get used to that heat sensation. And then when you take the third sip, and you take a proper sip this time, then you can taste the tequila.”

And with that, we can all surely lay to rest any doubts over whether the UK’s trade envoys have value. 

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