Dr. Antony Stokes, a former British Ambassador to Cuba and Vietnam, is leveraging social media to demystify the world of diplomacy, offering insights gained from a career spanning decades and continents. Stokes, who joined Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service in 1994 after a prior career in the private sector, began posting daily on LinkedIn in 2022 to address a perceived lack of public understanding about the role of an ambassador.
“People didn’t really understand what an ambassador did,” Stokes explained in a recent interview with the University of Cambridge’s Varsity newspaper. “I thought, I’ll just spend 15 minutes before I travel to bed to write on LinkedIn. I did it for 100 days in a row, and there was an enormous appetite for it.”
Stokes’s path to diplomacy was unconventional. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, with a degree in Electrical Sciences, and later earning a PhD in fibre-optics from University College London, he initially pursued a career outside of government. According to his profile on LinkedIn, he worked for both Schlumberger and Mars, Incorporated before entering the Foreign Office at the age of 30.
He recounted a somewhat unorthodox negotiation with the Civil Service during his application process. “I said to [the Civil Service]: ‘I don’t really want to do a job that a graduate is going to do. I’d want a more senior job. And also, I’m being paid quite well at Mars and I don’t want a graduate salary. You’re going to have to pay a little more and give me a more senior job.’ A day later, they came back and said: ‘Okay. We’ll give you a higher level job and a higher salary than the normal starting grade.’”
Stokes served as British Ambassador to Vietnam from 2010 to 2014, a period marked by strengthened UK-Vietnam relations, and later as Ambassador to Cuba from 2016 to 2022, according to the UK government website, GOV.UK. Prior postings included Bangkok, Seoul, and Riga, with a period as Head of Mission to Latvia. He also held the position of Ambassador-at-Large for Climate.
His interest in international affairs wasn’t immediately apparent during his time at Cambridge. Stokes described his extracurricular activities as largely unrelated to politics or diplomacy, highlighting a scientific expedition to study poison arrow frogs in the Colombian jungle, supported by the Royal Geographical Society, as a formative experience. “That was supported by the Royal Geographical Society, and I also did some work there for the Natural Astronomy Museum,” he told Varsity.
Since leaving formal diplomatic service, Stokes has continued to engage with the public through writing. He now publishes a weekly gazette on Substack, titled “The Gazette,” building on the audience he cultivated on LinkedIn. He explained that the move to Substack was driven by the platform’s capacity for longer-form writing, a constraint on LinkedIn. “People want to work in diplomacy and in some way with diplomats, so how do they receive to do that? That’s what I’ve been writing about,” he said.
Stokes’s LinkedIn profile currently lists him as an Ambassador at Large, with over 500 connections. His continued engagement through these platforms suggests an ongoing effort to bridge the gap between the often-opaque world of diplomacy and the public it serves.
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