Margaret Beckett may have endured a somewhat challenging start to her stint as foreign secretary, but her decision to appoint John Ashton to be her special representative for climate-change was widely applauded by environmental groups. Friends of the Earth, for example, described him as “a proven advocate with a track record in helping to move the global community forward on climate-change”.

Ashton himself says it is a “great privilege” to fulfil what is a new role within the Foreign Office. He has been charged with supporting ministers in delivering a “step-change” in the international response to climate-change – a new strategic priority for the FCO. His remit is to work closely with Defra and other key Whitehall counterparts, as well as national and international stakeholders, to help build a stronger political foundation for effective action to stabilise the climate.

Asked about the challenges of his new role, Ashton pinpoints the need to construct new and “much more potent” coalitions of interest to bring about “fundamental” changes in the structure of the global economy. “This is about achieving a transition from a high-carbon energy economy to a low-carbon energy economy,” he adds. “It’s about changing the way we get energy, the way we achieve mobility, and the way we use land – three of the most fundamental things that human activity is based on. So it is a very fundamental rewiring of the global economy, that has to be carried out at the highest possible level of urgency. What we need to build requires a much higher level of political mobilisation than we so far have achieved.”

Although the climate of the Earth is always changing, in the past it has altered as a result of natural causes. The changes that have occurred over recent years and those which are predicted over the next 80 years, however, are thought to be mainly as a result of human behaviour rather than natural changes in the atmosphere. For example, global temperatures have risen by over 0.7°C in the last 300 years; therefore climate-change is already taking place. Some 0.5°C of this warming occurred during the 20th century. Four out of five of the warmest years ever recorded were in the 1990s, with the 1990s being the warmest decade of the last millennium.

Ashton believes that there is enough known about the problem to know that the solutions are already available. “Don’t trust anybody who says we need to do lots of research on climate-change – the technologies we need are available now, and the capital we need to accelerate the deployment of those technologies is available now,” he says. “What we lack is the political imagination to put the propositions to people who are taking decisions about deploying that capital, to shift the direction of flow so we build a low-carbon infrastructure across the world.”

John Ashton was born in London in 1956. At the time his father was chief economist at what was then the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. He was then invited to set up a Department of Agricultural Economics at Newcastle University. “My mother still lives in Newcastle, and is a medical doctor who specialises in the effect of drugs on the brain,” Ashton says. “She still does research and teaches, and is now an Emeritus Professor at Newcastle University.”

Ashton, who doesn’t have a Geordie accent [“because I wasn’t born up there, and because neither of my parents are Geordies, it was never ingrained”], describes the North East as a great part of the country. “I thank my parents for lots of things, but nothing more than the chance to grow up in the North East, because the people are very real and genuine there, and I always feel instantly at home whenever I go back to visit my mum.”

Ashton went on to study natural sciences at Cambridge University. In his third year he specialised in theoretical physics. “I enjoyed my time in Cambridge hugely,” he recalls. “Probably drank too much beer, but it was a great time.” Asked about his career plans at the time, he says that he is more concerned with focusing on the present.

“I have always found it difficult to think long term about what I want to do and when,” he says. “I was by then immersed in a wonderful world of ideas. The ideas of physics are some of the most staggering achievements of the human mind, and I was lucky to be exposed to them, and to have some great teachers. Through this I developed an affinity with science, and particularly with physics. And after graduating, I went on to do some research in the radio astronomy group at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. So for a while, I was a very junior professional astronomer.”

However, the physics environment did not leave the young Ashton fully satisfied. “Physics is a fairly narrow world, and you end up with a fairly small number of people with whom you can discuss the things you’re trying to get your mind around,” he explains. “I was also interested in the wider human condition, and I developed a passion for travel. And it was this that made me apply to the Foreign Office, as I thought working there would give me the chance to see the world.”

While he was going through a “fairly protracted” application process, Ashton stayed working at the laboratory. However, his successful completion of the FCO’s entry tests presented him with what he describes as “the hardest decision I’ve ever had in my life” – namely whether to become a diplomat or stay as a physicist for the rest of his career. “I had no basis for taking this decision other than gut feeling. I chose diplomacy and haven’t regretted it for a moment,” he says.

Ashton, nevertheless, is keen to stress the high value that he places on his scientific training, saying that he feels as much a physicist as he does a diplomat or anything else.

“I do think that it is sad that there is such a barricade in this country between the natural sciences and the humanities,” he adds. “There is a real cultural barrier, which means that it’s still quite unusual to see people crossing it in either direction. We can’t take smart decisions on almost anything that matters in shaping the modern world, unless those decisions are based on a real and deep understanding on what science is telling us; so this is a real handicap. We’re not good at building that communication from the world of knowledge to the world of decisions.”

Ashton joined the Foreign Office in 1978. His first position saw him man the Maltese desk, but he admits to being “somewhat overwhelmed by the fabulous building and enormous history”. He also discovered that the department was beset by “quite a lot of inertia, and a culture that was quite hard to read and disentangle”.

Like all new recruits he was soon faced with deciding whether or not to study a language that would require a major input of time. “In my case they originally wanted me to learn Arabic,” he recalls. “I wasn’t too keen on this, but I was keen to learn Chinese, and so I was a little bit stubborn and managed to get my way. Looking back, that was a real crossroads moment because China has been a very big part of my career since.”

Ashton, who says he speaks “rusty Chinese” now, had the opportunity to spend two years full-time learning the language before taking up a posting to be the science attaché in Beijing in the early 1980s. On his return to London, he was promoted to head of the China desk – a position he held for two years before being transferred into the machinery of the joint intelligence committee to become a desk officer for international terrorism.

“I’ve found myself thinking back a little bit about this world in the light of recent events,” he admits. “It gave me an enormous admiration for some of the values on which this machinery is built – I think values that we can never take for granted. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) at that time was the best machinery of its kind in the world at giving ministers a dispassionate assessment of complex international pictures from a basis of all sources – not just intelligence, but publicly available information as well.”

Ashton soon found that his scientific training was to be of great help. “I suddenly found myself in a position where to all intents and purposes I was doing science again by another name,” he explains. “No-one else in that machinery would have described it that way because I think I was the only scientist in the assessments staff at that time. But what do you do in that job? You are the focus of lots of different streams of information and you have to make sense of that information, and say something coherent about what it means, and the picture of the world it is revealing. So essentially you have to form a hypothesis, and then you have to test it with experiments.”

He goes on to say that experiments are akin to the further bits of information that come in and whether or not they strengthen or weaken one’s idea. “This is the essence of the intelligence assessment process, and it really is very similar to the scientific process.” Ashton, interestingly, goes on to warn of the dangers of analysing raw intelligence data. “By its nature, intelligence has a mystique and there is a tendency to overvalue what you’re hearing as opposed to what you’re hearing from other sources. This needs to be guarded against very scrupulously.” he says.

One can’t help but wonder whether this way of thinking was fully in evidence on both sides of the Atlantic in the build-up to the war in Iraq. Nevertheless, Ashton, who worked in this area for two years, goes on to say that when he was there, the system for analysing intelligence was without doubt fit for purpose. “Although it is very hard to maintain a machinery which is completely dispassionate and impervious to political pressures, I think at that time the JIC machinery got it right.”

Was it a wrench to move on? “It was a bit of a wrench,” he admits. “I enjoyed it and got a lot out of it, but all of a sudden the Foreign Office said it wanted me to go and work in Rome. I wasn’t angling to go anywhere and wasn’t looking ahead to find a slot somewhere, and I subsequently found out lots of other people wanted the position they had offered me.” The eternal city, however, is hardly the worst place in the world to live – a fact Ashton is swift to endorse.

“To this day I don’t know why they were so keen for me to take that job. I actually resisted it for a while, and am so glad I didn’t dig my heels in too much, because I then had five great years in Rome. I didn’t know Italy, and had a rather inaccurate perception – I had no idea how much I would fall in love with it, and what a rich country it is in every way. I also think having a chance to live in one of the great cities of Europe is a really vital part of the education of any European. In the end I went there despite reservations, and enjoyed it so much I put down an anchor and I actually resisted quite a lot of attempts to get me to move on.”
Ashton was the number two in the political section of the embassy, reporting mainly on Italian politics – “which was terribly complicated and not of huge interest to people in London”. Having arrived with only a basic grasp of the language, it wasn’t a smooth start to begin with. “The most painful crisis of confidence I’ve ever had in my career was arriving in that job and being exposed to all these people who I just couldn’t communicate with,” he admits.

A month-long stay with an Italian family in Florence, and a total immersion in the subject, proved to be the solution. He also rapidly became interested in the Mafia: “The human suffering that has been caused by the activities of the various organised crime groups is enormous, and a lot of it has been made worse by a failure to understand the physiology of this phenomenon and how to tackle it,” he says. “I think now we have a much more systemic and thoughtful approach to organised crime. In my time we were looking at the consequences as individual events – we weren’t joining the dots.”

Ashton also found there to be a very close connection in the way of responding to terrorism and to organised crime. “I got it into my head that the UK was underestimating the extent to which Italian organised crime posed a threat to British interests, and I embarked on a personal campaign to draw it more to the attention of policy makers in London,” he recalls. “In the end I think we made a difference and certainly got a higher focus – for example, the JIC machinery started to do assessments of organised crime, something it had never done before. Again I was doing the same thing – trying to get lots of complex pieces of information, put them together, and say what they mean.”

Next stop for Ashton was Hong Kong, starting work as political adviser to the then governor, Chris Patten, in 1993. There he stayed, right up to the handover four years later. “I’d never been in a place where I was more conscious of living through history, and it was a very transformational experience to me,” he says. “In the nicest way and with a small ‘p’, it was a political awakening. Here was I, a civil servant, giving the best advice I could give, but very face-to-face, with the consequences of that advice for better or worse. I was left with no alternative but to think a lot more about the consequences of that advice, and I just found myself starting to operate in a more political way. You don’t go through that kind of transformation and then revert – it’s a one-way step – and ever since, it has been very much part of my professional personality. I would now describe myself in a completely non-party way as ‘intensely political’.”

The “intense experience” of Hong Kong left Ashton gravitating towards environmental diplomacy and climate-change – partly because it reconnected him with the interface between science and decisions. “And also because the more you look at those issues, the more you realise that they really are some of the shaping issues of this century,” he says. “I became absorbed in this, and persuaded the Foreign Office to let me have a short sabbatical, and became a visiting fellow at Green College at Oxford, returning to be head of environmental affairs at the Foreign Office.”

On his return to Whitehall, Ashton came to realise that it wasn’t possible to develop a Foreign Office approach to climate diplomacy unless it was part of a genuinely coherent Whitehall approach: easier said than done. “In no area have we really begun to do joined-up government in practice,” he claims. “I think that turf-conscious, silo-based decision making still exists in Whitehall. We’ve made some forays into how to do it better, and there are one or two examples where we have made real progress, but the default cultural mode – both of the civil service and of the politicians who end up in ministerial positions – reinforces this silo-based thinking. In a world of inter-dependence, we can’t have this, as we will not deliver the outcomes we need, because we are dealing with systemic problems and you can only deal with these with systemic responses.”

As far as Ashton is concerned, the “Victorian model” of Whitehall has enormous strengths, but it doesn’t “do systemic”. “It doesn’t do shaping a future very well. At its best it does crisis management as well as anywhere in the world, and can do line policies pretty well, but it can’t do shaping a complex future where every problem is inter-connected. There is no distinction now between domestic and foreign policy – energy, health, agricultural, finance and so on are all part of foreign policy and vice versa, so we need a different model. We’ve really only begun to scratch the surface.”

Ashton was appointed to his new role in June this year and took up the post a month later. Asked about his future plans, he points out that he is only on secondment from an organisation called Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G). Ashton set up E3G, a “change agency”, which has brokered deals on climate and energy between developed and developing countries, and says he is fully minded to return to work there at some stage. “What matters for my career is to live the job I’m doing as passionately as possible, and not to spend too much time thinking about where it might lead,” he says. “If you’re lucky enough to do a job like this, the only way you can do it well is to live it and to focus on what you can achieve in that job. I’m not thinking much beyond that.”