A top British diplomat to Canada says the ever-important job of maintaining relationships and information sharing between key allies is not much different than what audiences can watch on a hit Netflix drama.
Although The Diplomat is fictional, David Prodger, the British deputy high commissioner to Canada, says the ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling captures what it’s like to keep crises from spilling over from behind the scenes — particularly the “suppressed air of panic” around many of the characters.
“I think a lot of those little vignettes were very, very true to to real life,” Prodger told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block.
“You’re dealing with big issues, and you’ve got to deal with them quickly as well.”
The thriller stars Keri Russell as a career American diplomat who’s suddenly named the new U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, where she works to defuse disasters at home and abroad. The series has been filmed within real foreign offices and diplomatic residences in Britain and has been praised for its accuracy.
As depicted in the show, Prodger, who’s based in Ottawa, said diplomacy mostly involves keeping and developing smaller relationships between foreign diplomatic officials to ensure the “big picture relationship” is maintained, with officials at all levels constantly talking to each other.
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Yet he said the show may overstate the kind of access even high-ranking diplomats like himself would have with government officials.
“I’m not sure I could walk into (Foreign Affairs Minister) Melanie Joly’s office here,” he said.
“(But) whether it’s on the day-to-day policy side, whether it’s between our respective missions and our headquarters, we would expect to see our allies in and out of the foreign office the whole time.”
“Those relationships are actually key, and we spend a lot of time trying to get them in the right place,” he added.
Prodger said the Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership — which includes Canada and Britain along with the United States, Australia and New Zealand — is “becoming more important” as democracies work to protect national and economic security from growing threats.
As governments struggle to ensure people are getting the right information, he said it’s critical for like-minded countries to work together to counter disinformation and misinformation, as well as cyberattacks and other hostilities.
At the same time, he said part of the job involves being “mindful of of where the public opinion is.”
“We are public servants,” he said. “We work for our government, and therefore we have to be very much sort of thinking about how we present what we’re doing as well.”
Podger said transparency with the public on what the government knows about current and emerging threats, or during an emergency situation like a terrorist attack, is crucial.
Despite warnings from military and government officials that the current threat environment is more dangerous than before, Podger sees it differently.
“I think things are always on edge,” he said.
“If you look back 10 years, we had Iraq, we had Afghanistan, we had 9/11. Before that, we had the falling apart of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain coming down. We had genocide in Europe. So … there’s always been those big geopolitical questions. It’s just changing at the moment.
“I think what we’re seeing is … the global geopolitics is struggling to realign itself,” he said “I think that’s something we’re working really hard to do.”
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