I like ping pong. But I could have done without a year long match with the Foreign Office.

In theory, government departments are meant to be mostly transparent. If you ask for a piece of information, they’re supposed to share it with you, unless there is a good reason not to. But in reality, many ministries have got so adept at expanding those exceptions - so good at blocking citizens from finding out what they’re up to - that extracting documents from them is like trying to score a point against an Olympic table tennis champion.

I wanted to know how much staff at British embassies are shilling for Shell and BP around the world. How often do our diplomats help British oil giants win contracts to drill new oil reserves?

A particular atmospheric chemistry produced the 12,000 years of climatic stability - which scientists call the Holoscene - during which complex human civilisations were able to emerge. These same scientists have repeatedly warned us that Big Oil already has in its active wells much more carbon than humanity can safely pump into the atmosphere. Seeking out new oil supplies is an act of civilisation slaughter. How much is the Foreign Office facilitating it?

I started by ringing the umpire - Information Commissioner’s office - with what I thought was a straight question. Do individual British embassies count as information units? In other words, can I send a Freedom of Information Act request to the British High Commission in Canada (say) and ask for a list of meetings between them and Shell or BP in the last year? Or should such a request go to their bosses at the Foreign Office?

This might seem technocratic, but it mattered. If I asked the Foreign Office centrally for all meetings anywhere in the world between British diplomats and Shell and BP, they would turn down my request on the grounds that it was too much work. But if I could ask each embassy individually, then it wouldn’t be overly onerous for any one of them - the work of co-ordinating all the answers would fall to me. And I’m not afraid of a bit of admin. 

The woman at the Information Commissioner’s Office was initially hesitant - she’s more of a specialist in data protection, she said. But when I reexplained my question, her confidence grew - yes, embassies are individual information units, she said. Yes, I could send them Freedom of Information requests. 

I wanted to ask every embassy on earth about any meetings they had with BP or Shell, because I suspected we would find some in surprising places. 

So I did what I often do when I’m starting an investigation. I made a spreadsheet. 

I listed every country in the world, found out how many British embassies or consulates they all had, found an email address for each, and, in July last year, I sent all of them a request for a list of meetings with Shell or BP in the previous year. 

And so the game of ping pong began - with me serving more than 200 balls across the table. 

My opponent cried foul. Embassies started to get back saying that I should in fact have contacted the Foreign Office. I replied that I’d checked the rules with the umpire at the start. But then the umpire changed their mind - it turns out the person I’d spoken to at the Information Commission was wrong, you can’t FOI a British embassy directly.

In the meantime, I’d lost a month. Love, one. 

The Information Rights team at the Foreign Office suggested that “you may consider limiting your request to a single geographical region and/or team and limiting the timeframe to 3-6 months.”

When I asked them to clarify whether, by region, they were referring specifically to the four regions into which they divide up the world internally - the Middle East and Africa; Europe and Central Asia; Asia Pacific; the Americas - or if they mean some narrower category than this, they responded promptly.

“To be able to proceed with your request, we would be grateful if you could focus on one specific country/embassy across the FCDO. 

“Please accept our apologies for our previous refinement advice, on review this was not accurate”.

So I asked about Azerbaijan. They are meant to reply within 20 working days, which would take us to the 19th September. On the 30th, I pinged over a slightly gruff reminder. No response came.

I chased them again on 4 October, by which point it was three weeks overdue. They said they were gathering the information, but couldn’t tell me when it would arrive. 

At this point, exasperated, I decided to try a parallel path - I asked the Green MP Siȃn Berry to ask the minister for meeting lists directly. She put down a parliamentary question, asking for lists of meetings between seven specific embassies I’d picked (including in Baku, Azerbaijan) and Shell or BP staff. 

On 14 October, three months after I’d sent my first FOIs out, I got my first answer - a list of nine meeting dates between BP and British diplomats in Azerbaijan. Finally, one point to me.

A few days later, the foreign office minister Stephen Doughty replied to Siȃn, saying that the information she’d asked for - one fifth of which his department had just given me - wasn’t held centrally. I’m not saying he was knowingly lying to parliament. But he did clearly say something which wasn’t true (and the Foreign Office press office hasn’t responded to my questions about this).

I then picked one of these meetings, and asked for minutes from this. These finally appeared 28 working days later - past the deadline, but not far enough past it that it was worth me complaining. Four and a half months after starting the process, I finally had my hands on meeting minutes. Much of what was said was redacted. But what was left confirmed what I suspected - not any headline grabbing scandal; just the foreign office working in close partnership with one of the organisations burning the planet. 

Those minutes turned out to be more than I would get from most countries as we got into a bit of a rally with them.

I would ping off a request for meetings between embassies and BP staff in countries BP has recently opened up wells in. They would wait until a little after the deadline, but not long enough for me to complain to the commissioner, then send it over the net. I would then ask for minutes to one of the meetings (ask for more, and you risk them turning it down on workload grounds). They would then deny holding any such minutes.

Take, for example, the meeting between embassy staff in Caracas, Venezuela, on 25 October - a couple of months before Nicolas Maduro was deposed. “Dear Adam Ramsay… I am writing to advise you that following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by this Department. No minutes or readouts were made following the meeting, and no notes are held.”

Apparently, the only note from a meeting between the British consulate in Houston, and Shell, in January 2026 was a briefing sheet already on the Shell website. 

When I asked for a list of meetings between BP, Shell and the embassy in Tehran, they said they didn’t hold this information. Not that there weren’t any, but that they didn’t know if there were. Which, if true, is… surprising. And, given I’m not allowed to ask the embassy directly, we aren’t allowed to know either. 

When I asked for a list of meetings between BP and Shell and the Indonesian ambassador over the previous two years, they told me this was too broad - presumably because there are so many of them. I would, therefore, need to narrow down my request to meetings on a specific subject. I chose BP’s (ultimately successful) attempts to secure new drilling rights in Papua. 

This is - or, at least, ought to be - a highly controversial deal. Partly, because scientists have estimated it will produce over 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide - equivalent to the net reduction of all European Union emissions projected between the years 2015 and 2030. Partly, because this is the heart of the world’s third biggest rainforest. And partly because the people of West Papua have long struggled against Indonesian occupation, leading to half a million of them being killed over the last couple of generations. NGOs call it a ‘slow genocide,’ 

When they sent back a list of 16 meetings, I picked the one between the ambassador and the CEO. A couple of weeks later, a reply arrived in my inbox. “I am writing to advise you that following a search of our records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by this Department.”

I asked a follow up: if no minutes were taken, how did they know the meeting was related to BP’s activities in Papua? I haven’t had a reply yet.

Throughout this process, I put in a few parallel requests, if I thought they wouldn’t bundle them together with the ones above - ministers’ meetings are listed publicly, and I saw foreign minister Jenny Chapman had had a meeting with Shell, so asked for the minutes on 17 July last year. I got a reply - showing discussions about their desires in Venezuela - on 7 November, a little more than the 20 working day timeline intended. I’ve yet to get an answer to another request I put in on 18 May - meaning I’ve finally escalated to the Information Commissioner. 

While I published my long read on this subject earlier in the week, the ping pong match is ongoing. I think it’s clear that our diplomats are shilling for Shell and BP as they break open new oil wells around the world, killing off any chance of maintaining the climatic stability on which human civilisation is predicated. But they have worked very hard to obscure the details - both by repeatedly claiming that they have no record of meetings (which one foreign office staffer tells me is implausible), and by lying to an actual MP.

British foreign policy ought to be accountable to us. What our diplomats get up to on our behalf matters. But if we - and indeed, our MPs - aren’t allowed to know what they’re doing, then how can we know they’re really working for us? 

This doesn’t just apply to the climate crisis. Britain’s foreign policy departments have spent much of the last three years facilitating a genocide in Gaza, largely against the wishes of the British public. This has only been possible because of the lack of transparency and democracy at the heart of the British state.