Interview: Chatham House’s Robin Niblett
Some organisations struggle to have leaders with strategic vision. At Chatham House, that’s not a problem.
That’s because Robin Niblett doesn’t suffer from the usual pangs felt by thinktank bosses. If there’s one thing that unites this rare species, it’s the desperate desire to escape from the Westminster bubble and see the bigger picture. Niblett’s work focuses on the biggest picture of all.
Chatham House is the UK’s leading foreign policy thinktank. Ministers, experts and heads of state queue up to address its packed events. Behind closed doors, the UK government is assisted “at one remove”, as Niblett puts it, through the many and varied international contacts of its staff. In terms of international prestige, it’s up there with the top organisations of its kind around the world.
So it’s no surprise that, when I enter the director’s office, the surroundings are rather grand. Chatham House itself stands on the northern side of St James’ Square, just off Piccadilly. This is London’s clubland, the sort of place you’d pencil in for location filming for any Edwardian adventure. You might as well come to hear an update about Gordon’s progress in Khartoum as you would about Petraeus’ in Afghanistan. The solemn tick-tock of a grandfather clock, the book-lined walls, the enormous desk – any Foreign Office ministers would be pleased with this.
But Niblett isn’t an Edwardian. In fact he flatly rejects the popular notion that geopolitics has returned to the same sort of state it was at the beginning of the 20th century. His organising principle is about money, not politics.
“Those in charge depend upon delivering wealth and happiness in order to remain in power,” he explains.
“My sense is we’re not moving towards a single form of political organisation but we are moving towards a form of economic organisation where we still compete on the margins, but ultimately we’re all bought into the same game.”
It’s a neat little summary of the world we live in – the kind of thoughtful titbit which journalists gratefully seize on. You might expect him to sprout a white beard at any moment and start stroking it. After all, he’s just made the sort of sweeping statement which would make most of us giddy with its breadth. Not Niblett, whose job it is to gaze at the world.
But that’s not true, is it? Not at all. If Niblett’s purpose was solely focused on ivory towers and navel-gazing Chatham House wouldn’t get far. Like any thinktank director, there is much more to the job than just pontificating about the state of the planet. So he spends up to 40% of his time, he estimates, keeping up good relationships with Chatham House’s funders. He has to oversee the work of ‘heads of research’, as he calls them, who are able to do media work, manage staff and projects and sell them to funders – as well as conceptualising ideas. “It’s quite a combination of managerial, intellectual and communication skills that are demanded not just of me but of every person in a senior position of research,” he says. White beards are welcome, but not always appropriate, on News 24. Niblett’s assured charm is much closer to what the doctor ordered.
It’s a strange mix of big ideas and the more mundane tasks of keeping an organisation going. Both require one thing more than any other: a sense of strategy. Headlines about Afghanistan tend to suck journalists and politicians into a single-minded approach to the war against the Taliban. Niblett sees the bigger picture, arguing that the presence of British troops there actually has nothing to do with David Cameron’s global strategy at all. He’s interested in shifting attention towards China and India. “This government is worried that our ability to be best positioned to take advantage of it is going to be completely undermined by an overfocus on Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan isn’t the big picture? After a dizzy spell of my own, I realise that he’s probably right.
The big strength of Chatham House is in its connections with the rest of the world. Less policy talk, Niblett explains, is emphatically more. “We fit in the British foreign policy-making world by talking less about British foreign policy and more analytically about what we think’s happening outside,” he says.
Foreign Office officials can tap into Chatham House’s network of connections – with other governments, foreign businesses, individuals, similar organisations, etc – as well as its own expertise. “That accessibility, that knowledge, that insight, then becomes part of what they can use to develop their own policies.” There’s the big ideas, of course, but there’s also smaller-scale issues which – of course – aren’t really that small-scale at all.
The “nitty-gritty” of how patents are developed and then protected is a big issue when it comes to the role technology can play in the future of energy security and climate change policy, for example. This affects the EU, the US government and the Chinese government. “We are working with the Chinese about how they’re thinking about climate change and energy security within a global context. By working with the Chinese, we are helping achieve one of the UK objectives of UK foreign policy.”
Spending so much time looking at the world’s future, it’s no surprise Niblett is so ambitious when it comes to his own organisation’s plans. It’s been three years since he took on the job; with Chatham House keen for him to stay on for longer, does he have any Stalinist five-year plan?
Almost. Niblett is certainly expansionist (this is more acceptable for thinktanks than it is for states). Chatham House may be on the same level as its US-based equivalents, like Brookings or the Center for Foreign Relations, but it has only a fraction of their cash. “I know we don’t have the resources at their disposal that they have,” he says. Resources equals money, and money equals people.
“My big objective in the next four or five years is to make sure we have the resource base – and that is funding – to be able to match them in terms of our communications and our staff capacities. There’s one more step up Chatham House could do.”
That’s the problem with dealing with the world: there’s always more you can do to make things better. It’s what Chatham House does best.
