I’m convinced there’s a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

Ustinov’s quip satirizes the evasiveness and studied ambiguity often associated with official diplomacy. By imagining a literal “small room in the attic” of the Foreign Office where diplomats are trained to stammer, he turns a rhetorical habit—hesitation, hedging, and non-answers—into an institutional practice. The joke implies that obfuscation is not an accidental personal flaw but a professional skill cultivated to avoid commitments, preserve deniability, and keep options open. It also reflects Ustinov’s broader comic persona: using theatrical imagery to puncture bureaucratic self-importance and to suggest that public-facing language can be deliberately engineered to conceal rather than clarify.