John Bolton was in London last week, which sent me flicking back through a memoir he wrote about his 17 chaotic months as Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
This was during Trump’s first term and Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, lurches from Iranian drama to North Korean turbulence, amid asides about the US president wondering if the UK has nuclear weapons, or if Finland is part of Russia.
One story I kept thinking about concerned the opening ceremony of a 2018 Nato summit where Bolton was seated next to the UK’s then-new foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt. As they watched the leaders mingling for a group photo, Hunt turned to Bolton and said: “Some leaders have small talk, and some don’t; you can tell in a minute who they are.”
“An interesting insight,” wrote Bolton, which it was.
A lot of guff is written about how dull and exhausting small talk can be. In social situations, maybe. But it is an entirely different matter in the office.
A large amount of work consists of person A trying to get person B to do something even though both report to person C. Much is gained if A can keep up with B’s latest half-marathon times, and whether they prefer to holiday in Cornwall or Devon.
Also, the smartest leaders know that breaking the ice is just one element of small talk. It also offers the chance to learn a lot of useful stuff. Don’t take my word for this. It is almost exactly what Jeremy Hunt, as he is now, said when I called to ask which leaders did and did not do small talk well.
I had an inkling about the latter. A British official I know of who once had to pick up Theresa May from the airport prepared half a dozen small-talk points to get through the traffic-jammed drive ahead. He had to use them all before they got out on to the motorway.
One reason people dislike idle chat is the ever-present fear of the small-talk gaffe, or what I think of as the Hugh Grant effect. In Four Weddings and a Funeral, Grant’s bumbling character, Charles, tries to exchange wedding party pleasantries with a man named John by asking how his gorgeous girlfriend is. “Oh,” says John, “she’s no longer my girlfriend.”
“Oh dear,” says Charles, adding he wouldn’t be too gloomy because “rumour has it she never stopped bonking old Toby de Lisle just in case you didn’t work out”. John stares and then says slowly: “She is now my wife.”
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Hunt famously committed his own small-talk blunder within weeks of that 2018 Nato summit. As he recalled last week, he was in Beijing for a big meeting with China’s foreign secretary Wang Yi, and had prepared two bits of small talk: both men spoke Japanese, and Hunt’s wife was Chinese.
“But in the heat of the moment, I muddled them up and I said, ‘I’m so delighted to be here because my wife is Japanese.’” Caught on camera, he frantically tried to call his then-asleep wife back in London, eventually getting through to hear her say: “Konnichiwa, darling.”
Hunt remains a fan of small talk nonetheless, because you can learn so many important things about important people. Over lunch in Chequers with Trump one day, he remembers talk turning to China, and Trump saying, “Isn’t it incredible, they’ve become so powerful without firing a shot.” It was an early insight into the fascination with economic power that would shape his policies in office.
Of all the prime ministers Hunt worked with, he says the one who best understood the value of small talk was David Cameron. Countless times, he watched Cameron seeming to chat randomly with an executive about, say, life in the fast-food industry, while hoovering up data about the high street.
The next day, Cameron would be telling ministers “they’re finding business rates an absolute nightmare, or something like that”, says Hunt. “He never thought the small talk was a waste of time.”
I somehow doubt Bolton does either. I saw the hawkish diplomat when he came in to the Financial Times last week. Waiting for a meeting to start, he was amiable, gracious and chatty. I did not agree with half of what he then went on to say. But there was also no mystery about why so many people are still happy to hear him say it.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
