Today’s true diplomats are comers and goers, tourists, foreign correspondents, exchange students, visiting artists and celebrities... They are fair-trade inspectors, merchant bankers and call-centre outsourcers... These new diplomats carry less historical baggage than their predecessors. In India recently I was told time and again that the British high commission was associated with the Raj while the British Council was associated with Shakespeare and London University. Indians preferred the latter... Libraries are still the easiest way of reaching and creating young Anglophiles. In this the council has always been not just the poor relation of the Foreign Office, but less appreciated even than the BBC World Service...

The council ought to be the lead diplomatic department in all but the most politically sensitive countries... Politics, defence and commerce should be subsidiary activities. In an age of soft power, western democracies will do far better in propagating their values of freedom of speech and expression by the exchange of people and ideas than by the bullying diplomatic rhetoric of the war on terror.

Excerpted from Simon Jenkins’ ‘Russian assault on the British Council reveals the true nature of diplomacy’ in The Guardian, 18 January