For some, the British Council is an organisation that will forever be associated with the Cold War and moustachioed characters from Graham Greene novels propagandising in dark corners of Europe.

The organisation’s chief executive, Martin Davidson, is working hard to dispel such perceptions – a task not helped, he acknowledges, by the recent debacle over the closure of two of the council’s offices in Russia. The events of this past winter may have been “traumatic” for the organisation, but Davidson exudes optimism about the increasing relevance of the council as a tool of cultural exchange and diplomacy.

Davidson was born in Lowestoft, the son of an engineer from Glasgow, and spent his childhood years in Cambridge and Camberley, in Surrey. After school in Guildford, he went up to St Andrews University to study for a degree in English.

Having both a Scottish university education and a Glaswegian father, he is aware of his roots but says that his identity is distinctively “British”. “I remember years ago I spent a summer in Iceland and met a guy who was determined that I had to be either Scottish or English or Welsh, but it didn’t seem to me that that reflected my identity in any way whatsoever,” he says.

“I suppose as an individual I moved through different parts of England, I went to university in Scotland and was very conscious of my Scottish background. My Scottish grandmother was a ferocious old bag and a stalwart of the Kirk and so on, so there was a real mix of influences and I think that affected me in terms of the whole of my approach to my work.”

Upon graduation, he was one of the last entrants to the long departed overseas civil service and was sent to work in Hong Kong in 1979. Spending four years as an administrative officer was an “extraordinary” experience for a young graduate eager to see the world, he says. But murmurings of the demise of British rule in Hong Kong were “just beginning”, and the younger Davidson found himself discomfited by some of the attitudes of his older colleagues.

“I was a district officer in one of the outlying regions and I remember within the first few months of my having taken up that job, the suggestion was made that we actually have elected members to the district board, and this caused the most unbelievable uproar among some of my some of my longer-term colleagues. Their attitude was ‘what on earth are we doing bringing elected people in?’ They wouldn’t even have had any authority, it was an advisory board.

“I think that tension was always present in Hong Kong and in some senses, Hong Kong had a very old-fashioned constitution, even for a British colony, because of the nature of the relationship with China,” he adds.

What “pushed the agenda” with regard to reunification was the growing concern among Hong Kong homebuyers that they were taking out mortgages on properties they might not own after a possible handover of the colony to communist China. Having seen the proverbial writing on the wall, Davidson decided that continuing a career in colonial administration could only mean “administering yourself out of a job”.

“I think I’d fallen out of sympathy with the way Hong Kong was being governed by that stage, not because of the individuals involved. There was this big difference between the British government’s approach to Hong Kong and the way that was being interpreted on the ground by some of the longer-in-the-tooth colonial staff, so it was clear to me at the age of 27 or 28 that Hong Kong was not going to be for me.”

From diplomat to teacher

His new wife was working as a teacher for the British Council and, after deciding against joining one of Hong Kong’s major companies, Davidson entered the council in late 1983 and was quickly posted to Beijing, albeit with no recognition of his prior service.

Thus began an association with China that has dominated and defined his career at the British Council. Although the early 1980s saw the very beginnings of the process of China’s economic opening up, with the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, the country Davidson found was “light years” from today’s 21st century powerhouse.

“When I first went there the ‘anti-spiritual pollution’ campaign was still going on and people were  being arrested for talking to foreigners, so the only way you came into much contact with people was actually cycling; you would cycle down these big cycle lanes, surrounded by hordes of people. Ten people would come up beside you and you’d hold a conversation in the cycle lane, because it was safe.”

“If you invited Chinese nationals to your house, they actually had to have a piece of paper with an official stamp on it which said they were allowed to talk to you, and when you compare that with China now, it’s just light years away.

“There were only two roads out of Beijing you could drive on; one was to the airport and the other was to the Great Wall, and any deviation from that and somebody with a bayonet would pop out of the bushes and stop you.”

As well as dealing with the peculiarities of living in communist China two decades ago, Davidson and other council staff were confronted with everyday challenges to running their operations, not least having to work out of bicycle sheds at the British embassy. The picture he paints is of a vast, esoteric land about which, beyond “a few specialists”, little was known.

Illustrating that extreme lack of understanding, he remembers “being asked if I wouldn’t mind popping down to Hainan to give an English test, which was by train a 48-hour journey in those days”.

After a return to London, the second “chunk” of Davidson’s China career coincided with the traumatic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Surprisingly, he volunteers a tentative comparison between the international reaction to those protests and the recent controversies surrounding Beijing’s hosting of this summer’s Olympics and the treatment of Tibet.

“It would be silly to claim the last few months had been like 1989 and Tiananmen but in both cases there’s this slightly strange sense of people slightly feeling betrayed, of people feeling that China isn’t the sort of China they thought it ought to be.”

He adds: “I thought some of the reaction to the issues of the Olympic flame and so on were a little bit the same, that somehow people were shocked when China revealed something of the reality of itself, but in exactly the same way as after Tiananmen, my view is that China is a country which you simply have to engage with.”

But doesn’t this invite accusations of equivocation, or even moral complicity? Those are questions the organisation must constantly ask itself, he says, but insists that the long-term engagement and cultural exchange offered by the British Council can only happen because the council is unequivocal about its “values base”.

Engaging with China

It is striking to hear a former British colony administrator warn of the dangers of a “colonial mentality”, the danger of the British Council and other Western organisations seeking to win over the “hearts and minds” of populations in far-off lands.

Since taking over the top job at the council last year, Davidson has advocated mutuality and engagement, a relationship in which both parties make an honest attempt to find out about the other. In the case of China, this must mean more than attending the sell-out exhibition of the Terracotta warriors at the British Museum, but government and individuals attempting to understand the vastness and complexity of a country of 1.3 billion people.

This approach to cultural exchange informs another of the council’s priorities, which is, inevitably, engagement with the Islamic world. In recent years, the organisation helped fund a project in which photographers from Middle Eastern countries were invited to take pictures of life among Britain’s Muslim communities.

The resultant show, ‘Common Ground’, was exhibited across the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, and offered an instructive example of the new kind of cultural diplomacy prioritised by the council. Despite “getting stick from the Daily Mail” over such activities, Davidson says they have real value because the people who view them know what they seeing is “authentic”.

To propagandise is not just patronising, Davidson says, it is actually counterproductive in an age where populations all over the globe have access to a proliferation of information sources and are increasingly sophisticated in their use of media.

But while the council strives to facilitate dialogue, it must be seen to deliver a public service in return for the subsidy received from the taxpayer. In an age where the interests of the nation state seem increasingly complex and even contradictory, I ask the chief executive how the council decides on its goals and priorities.

Although stressing the council is at “arms’ length” from government, Davidson says they have regular discussions with the Foreign Office about Britain’s strategic interests and then decide how their activities can help contribute to those ends.

“We – and the British Council’s board – are incredibly protective of the operational independence because we believe that’s how we actually deliver value, if we allow that to be eroded. If we allow it to be undermined, if people no longer believe that in engaging with the British Council you are engaging with a broader UK rather than simply the British government of the time, then ultimately we lose our raison d’être.”

Growing pains

Nevertheless, as the focus of British foreign policy has moved away from Europe, so has the British Council, often with painful consequences for staff and local populations.

“It’s 60 years-plus of a settled way of doing business which we’ve broken. This is actually the second tranche of shifting money out of Europe – we moved 30 per cent out this time, we probably took 20 per cent out last time – so we’ve probably halved the resources going into Europe over the last five years,” says Davidson.

“Managing that shift, managing that change, has been difficult and quite painful, but I’m very convinced indeed that the sort of work we are now doing makes us much more relevant, and it’s going to be relevant for the next 30 years, whereas I think what we used to do was increasingly being seen as irrelevant.”

He adds: “We are, of course, still keen to work with global organisations and global key contacts, but instead of doing it on a bilateral presentation of the UK, we do it on exploring shared agendas, shared European agendas. Whether those are issues of migration, new populations, how cities work, climate change and the impact on Europe, it’s those sorts of issues that we are dealing with.”

Where the council retains a large presence in continental Europe – in Madrid and Paris, for instance – it is paid for by the revenue generated by its English lessons and other activities. Davidson says that when he now goes to Brussels, commissioners do not assume he is trying to “extract some money”, but are interested in the potential of public diplomacy and cultural exchange.

Returning to the council’s difficulties in Russia, Davidson is good-humoured and optimistic enough to note a silver lining to the affair: he says the British Council’s public profile is probably now higher than at any point in its history, and will no doubt be heartened by the broadly positive report from the National Audit Office (NAO), published last week.

But as honest and candid as the British Council strives to be in its approach to cultural diplomacy, the former Hong Kong civil servant has learnt though experience that perceptions of Britain are very often a hostage to history. With a wry smile, Davidson relates the story of a council event in Beijing to mark the first visit of Tony Blair in 1998.

“At the end of it we were asking some of those people who’d taken part what they thought and whether or not it had affected them; and one girl said: ‘What you did was fabulous, I loved seeing everything you’ve done, loved seeing this different UK which I didn’t know and I didn’t understand, and met the prime minister. But at the end of the day I can never forget the Opium Wars.’”