The details of what British Ambassadors think about the country where they were posted in their valedictory letters were disclosed to the BBC under freedom of Information laws.

The British diplomats are bored stiff with the endless rounds of cocktail parties and they were also frustrated with their stiff necked image as bowler hatted, chinless,with pinstriped suits and fondness for champagne as per Gore Booth in 1966 as he prepared to leave Delhi.

Roger Pinsent, Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Nicaragua in 1967 wrote “There is, I fear, no question that the average Nicaraguan is one of the most dishonest, unreliable, violent and alcoholic of the Latin Americans,” Pinsent wrote.

Two years later, David Hunt - then high commissioner to Nigeria - said the West African country’s leaders had “a maddening habit of always choosing the course of action which will do the maximum damage to their own interests.”

“Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery,” Hunt claimed in his letter. Lord Moran, high commissioner in Ottawa, Canada, between 1981 and 1984, claimed Canadians had limited talents.

“Anyone who is even moderately good at what they do – in literature, the theater, skiing or whatever - tends to become a national figure. And anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once,” Moran wrote in his letter, according to files released to the BBC.

Anthony Rumbold, Britain’s ambassador to Thailand from 1965 to 1967, mocked his hosts for an apparent lack of culture. “They have no literature, no painting and only a very odd kind of music; their sculpture, ceramics and dancing are borrowed from others, and their architecture is monotonous and interior decoration hideous,” Rumbold wrote. “Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich, and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all,” he said.

The Foreign Office ended the tradition of valedictory letters in 2006, after a message from Ivor Roberts - Britain’s departing ambassador to Italy - was leaked to the media.

Roberts criticized the ministry’s management culture, and fondness for buzzwords. “Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews ... and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about,” he wrote.

After reading this article it seems so true that Diplomats have certainly forgotten what diplomacy is all about.