In his 36 years as a civil servant and diplomat, Daniel Pruce has worked in many impressive and glamorous venues, from No.10 to embassies in Spain and the Philippines. But after becoming governor of the British Virgin Islands just over two years ago, he discovered a more prosaic venue in which to engage with citizens: the supermarket.
“It’s made very clear to you, as you’re preparing for the governorship, that you are going to be a very visible and high-profile person within the local environment,” Pruce tells CSW. “I love the fact that people come up to me in the street and want to have a chat about what’s going on – anything from the condition of the roads through to global affairs. But you have to get into a mindset where you’re prepared for that any time of the day or night.” Recently, a “very nice person” stopped him at the supermarket to invite him to an event. He doesn’t seem to mind terribly, but says it can be disconcerting to find “everyone knows what you had in your shopping trolley”.
As governor, Pruce acts as the king’s representative in the Virgin Islands – a British overseas territory of roughly 30,000 people in the Caribbean which is known for its natural beauty. The territory is managed by an elected government that sits in its House of Assembly, while the governor’s responsibilities, set out in the BVI Constitution, include matters of security and disaster preparedness as well as supporting good governance. The governor is also head of the civil service – called the public service – which consists of around 3,000 “public officers”.
While he may not have envisioned these trolley-pushing encounters, they do feel in the spirit of the goals Pruce has set for himself. In his swearing-in speech, he pledged to be “as open and transparent” in his work as possible and “accessible to everyone, including all branches of civil society, public servants and the private sector”.
“You’ve got to have quite broad shoulders in a job like this”
To that end, he spends a lot of time visiting community groups and local charities to learn about their work and help raise their profile, as well as hosting fundraisers at his official residence, Government House. He has also been working with local ministries and community partners to provide more support for young people who are at risk of being recruited by criminal networks.
“Governor roles can all be about pomp and ceremony, and separated from the local community that you’re working within. In my experience, being an effective governor… it’s about getting your sleeves rolled up, getting stuck in,” Pruce says. “I am very privileged to be living here in a very nice house. But I consider it a really important part of my job to get out of the house as much as I can, and be out and about in the community.”
At times, “getting stuck in” is taken rather literally, like when Pruce showed up to help with the cleanup after Tropical Storm Ernesto in August 2024. “I did find myself out one afternoon trying to wield a pickaxe to clear a blocked drain,” he says. “I didn’t equip myself particularly successfully with my pickaxe-wielding skills but I did manage to get most of the dirt and grime and mud over myself rather than clearing a lot of it.”
When Pruce first joined the Foreign Office in 1990, he never imagined himself becoming the governor of an overseas territory. But then, that’s been the case for much of his career. In the 1990s, he worked primarily on European Union issues, during which he once told a minister – with the best of intentions – that a proposed initiative to bang the drum for the benefits of EU membership at an event with a sceptical audience would be a “courageous decision”. “There was this look of terror on his face at the prospect of his taking a courageous decision and I think in the end he didn’t do it, or he changed the plan quite dramatically,” he recalls, laughing. (Pruce had yet to watch the episode of Yes Minister in which Sir Humphrey tells a colleague that to put a minister off a proposal, “you must say the decision is ‘courageous’” – “a bit of life replicating art”, the governor says.)
His wide-ranging career has included two years as British spokesman on EU issues at the UK’s Permanent Representation to the EU and a stint at NATO headquarters in Brussels during the Kosovo War in 1999. He has also worked in the No.10 press office and spent three years as the director of the then-FCO’s change programme.
He has since held a number of high-flying diplomatic roles: he was deputy head of mission in Bangkok and Madrid before becoming the UK’s ambassador to the Philippines in 2017. “It’s been a remarkable privilege… It’s fascinating how your career path leads you in directions which you wouldn’t have predicted, and which give you incredible opportunities to make a positive difference,” he says.
Asked about the proudest moments of his career, he recalls the “leadership and logistical challenge” of extracting UK visitors from the Philippines in spring 2020 after Covid hit. “There were very, very high levels of public criticism that the embassy, the government weren’t doing enough. I was enormously proud of my team during that very difficult period,” he says.
“The Philippines is a country of 7,000 islands and, understandably, many of the Brits that we were trying to get home were not all sitting together neatly in Manila. They were in these far-flung, remote islands scattered across the entirety of the country,” he says. Getting them to an airport sometimes meant organising a tuk tuk, a speedboat, a motorbike and a taxi – “literally working out every little stage of the journey to get people from these locations where they were completely stuck through no fault of their own”.
Pruce says he has an “abundance” of opportunities to make a positive impact in his current job too. While there is still a “large amount of diplomacy” involved, he says he found the prospect of having a “high level of accountability” for specific public services a new and compelling challenge.
“Those are all great jobs and I totally loved doing them. But, as you’d expect, in a diplomatic role you’re very much focused on understanding and influencing the environment that you’re in, the government that’s hosting you,” he says.
"If things are going well, that’s very visible; if they’re going wrong, that’s also very visible”
By contrast, Pruce says he has been struck by how quickly his decisions as governor can impact local people. “Previously in my career, the distance between the decision point and the public delivery point felt very lengthy... here, things feel much more compressed,” he says. Adjusting traffic patrols, for example, “can have a very visible impact in literally a matter of days” – which is “quite exhilarating”. But, he adds: “It also means that you have to be very confident the decisions you’re taking are proportionate, balanced and effective. Because if things are going well, that’s very visible but equally, if they’re going wrong, that’s also very visible.”
Pruce arrived in office in January 2024, 18 months after the publication of the highly critical Commission of Inquiry report – a major review to investigate corruption and abuse of office that found the people of the BVI had “been badly served in recent years”. Led by former Court of Appeal judge Sir Gary Hickinbottom (now president of Welsh Tribunals), the review identified systemic, “endemic” corruption, dishonesty and a disregard for the rule of law in BVI governance. The governance failures were such that the UK government drafted an Order in Council after the inquiry, which would have enabled ministers to temporarily suspend the BVI’s constitution and implement direct rule had the recommendations of the report not been carried out.
By the time Pruce became governor, he says, progress on tackling the 48 recommendations that arose from the inquiry had lost momentum. For the first few months on the job, he focused on getting the “very challenging schedule of work” back on track.
“You were looking at everything from establishing an integrity commission, to improving the way that appointments to statutory boards were being handled, to making the administration of social support grants more transparent and more effective. The CoI reached right across every dimension of government,” he says, “and so it was a very significant body of work for any jurisdiction to take on, particularly a small one.”
Over the course of 2024, Pruce and local officials made “real inroads” into some of the main recommendations. The Order in Council was lifted on 13 March this year, which Pruce calls “a significant positive step forwards”. “I think the challenge is: we have the legislation, the regulations, the frameworks in place to ensure improved governance. The focus now has to be on effective implementation,” he says.
That implementation sits “very much on the locally elected government’s shoulders” but Pruce has an important role to play in monitoring progress, reporting to ministers and facilitating support from the UK government where it is needed.
The CoI also led to a thorough review of the territory’s justice and security sector by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue in 2023 – including the governor’s areas of responsibility, such as the police force and the territory’s prison, as well as some areas overseen by the local government, such as immigration and customs. The inspectorate identified serious failings across the territory’s nine law enforcement and criminal justice agencies – some “so serious as to endanger the lives of staff and the public” – and a “serious lack of anti-corruption focus”. Across two reports, it made more than 500 recommendations for the agencies related to, among other things, standards of behaviour, training and treatment of detainees.
Pruce has been working with the local government to develop a programme of work to deliver those changes over the next decade – beyond his term as governor. “My objective is to ensure that we build as much momentum as we can in these early stages and that we have a good programme framework in place for the work to continue after I’ve moved on,” he says. “If we get it right, the benefits will be very noticeable and very significant. If we get it wrong, they won’t be. So it’s a really concrete example of the application of some of the core civil service skills you pick up over your career in terms of effecting change to benefit the citizen and delivering in the real world.”
The programme includes the introduction of a robust system to vet police officers and, later, prison, immigration and customs officers. The BVI’s nearly 300-strong police force is “operating in an environment where the real-world challenges of criminality are becoming more complex and more challenging”, Pruce says; organised crime is a significant challenge for the territory, largely driven by financial crime and drug trafficking. The lack of a vetting system and historical funding deficits have hindered its efforts, he says.
The vetting process “will contribute enormously to levels of public confidence and trust in the police officers that are ensuring the security of the jurisdiction”, Pruce says. “So it’s a big thing. It’s something that we need to put in place as rapidly as we can but it’s also something where there is no precedent or local existing capability that we can build upon.”
BVI officials are therefore working with the International Policing Assistance Service, which operates under the authority of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Home Office, to develop the vetting system using a programme-based approach. “We’re relying very heavily on Home Office systems,” adds Pruce – who is keen throughout the interview to stress how “absolutely critical” cross-government engagement is to the successful governance of the BVI.
There are now regulations and legislation in place to support the programme of work, and Pruce and his colleagues are working to finalise agreements with the agencies involved to enable more information sharing.
The final piece of the puzzle is political communication. “People’s responses to the prospect of being vetted will vary,” Pruce says. “Some are comfortable with it; some are less comfortable. Some have a good understanding; some not so much. So we’ve spent a lot of time engaging across the force, across the political spectrum, to try to explain that this is a process which isn’t about catching people out. It’s actually about giving officers themselves a level of protection [by identifying potential vulnerabilities]… and also providing a level of confidence and trust amongst the general public in terms of how the police are operating.”
“I’ve never supervised a police force before. I’ve never delivered a vetting programme before. And I think it’s essential to acknowledge that you’re moving into areas where you need to learn"
CSW wonders if Pruce’s diplomatic experience has helped here. Absolutely, he says: “A lot of what the governor in this role – in any governance role – is trying to achieve is bound up with the ability to communicate, to influence, to deal with legitimate issues that others may raise, which need solutions. So the whole business of discussion, accommodation, understanding – those core civil service skills you learn as you’re delivering results are absolutely critical to this.”
That also means being able to withstand feedback when making unpopular decisions. “You have to focus on what you’re trying to achieve, rather than any personal criticism that may be thrown at you... You’ve got to have quite broad shoulders in a job like this,” he says.
He also stresses the importance of having humility and an open mind. “I’ve never supervised a police force before. I’ve never delivered a vetting programme before. And I think it’s really essential to acknowledge as governor that you’re moving into areas where you yourself need to learn as well and not to make any assumptions based on your previous experience, and be very mindful that… this is going to require you to learn new things and develop yourself and learn a lot from the people around you.”
That humility emerges when CSW asks how Pruce winds down from work. He describes himself as a “very bad runner”, which he says is as much about enjoying peace and solitude in the early morning as it is about exercise. “I think it is very true on a small island that you do need to just get away [sometimes]. That’s not because there’s anything unpleasant about being here. But this concept of island fever, I think, is quite real.” Visiting the BVI’s sister islands or spending a few days further afield “makes a big difference to the ability to recharge [as well as] keeping things in perspective and giving yourself some downtime”, he adds.
But he is also quick to extol the territory’s virtues: “One of the great joys of being here is it is a stunningly beautiful natural environment. The opportunity to see incredible bird life, plant life, marine life is literally on your doorstep.” He has seen thousands of pink flamingos, which inhabit the salt plains of the northernmost island, Anegada, and turtles swimming past him in the sea. “It’s just incredible,” he says. “You never forget what a precious privilege it is to be working somewhere where you have ready access to very special things like that.”
Daniel Pruce on… BVI civil servants
“You’ve got some fantastic talent within that service – very committed to their roles across the full range of ministries, working within an administrative culture which has developed over time and which has some differences to the way things work in the UK civil service… I’m not saying things are better or worse. They’re just different. You need to put the time in to get the hang of that, and to ensure that you’re bringing people along with you.
“The population of the territory is less than 30,000 people. The decisions that you make will have a direct impact on a significant proportion of that relatively small population so taking the time to invest in proper discussion, consultation, stakeholder engagement is particularly important in this environment and is hardwired into the administrative processes.”