Diplomatic credentials presented in cash In R.J. Cutler's 2009 documentary The September Issue , a Parisian fashion lady leans over to flamboyant Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley and tells him she considers the magazine's long-time editor Anna Wintour "the most powerful woman in the United States." She doesn't mean political power, of course, but rumours are ricocheting around British newspapers that Ms Wintour, the 63-year-old born in Britain but now a US citizen, is in line for a real government job: ambassador to the Court of St James's. Rumours of a diplomatic posting for Ms Wintour also flew after Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008, and there is no more reason to take them seriously today. But they raise pertinent questions about what makes a good diplomat and what diplomacy is for. Ms Wintour has the paramount qualification for an ambassador, it turns out, and she has it in abundance. Christopher Caldwell In our inconsistently meritocratic time, people have a lot of misgivings about the concept of "g," or "general intelligence." But there is no scepticism at all that there exists such a thing as "general leadership," or what might be called "l." When a cabinet member leaves his post to cash in on Wall Street, he goes straight to the corner office. He's got "l." He was born to run - run large organisations, that is. Little training will be necessary, even if politics (which involves painting rosy pictures for a credulous public) and finance (which involves debunking rosy pictures for hard-bitten investors) are dissimilar jobs. The contrast between fashion and diplomacy is even greater. The most important trait for the editor of the world's top fashion magazine is, one assumes, an ability to recognise when a model's posture or a designer's weave or a photographer's lighting looks common, ugly, graceless or dumpy - and to say so. Diplomacy is the art of letting such things pass unremarked. Nevertheless, the US has sent all sorts of people to the UK, from the author Nathaniel Hawthorne (consul to Liverpool when his college chum Franklin Pierce was president) to the British-born socialite Pamela Harriman (ambassador under Bill Clinton). The prevailing prejudice is that leadership proved in any realm can transfer to any other. Many American diplomats dissent. They operate in the most frustrating kind of system - a rule-bound guild that awards its plum jobs to outsiders. They think a non-partisan, European-style system, based on testing or seniority or some combination thereof, produces more qualified ambassadors. That sounds reasonable enough, but foreign service is not about reason. It is about raison d"état. An ambassadorship is a duty to defend the interests of one's country, not a perquisite. Loyalty is immeasurably more important than expertise. A president's affection is likely to be a better measure of loyalty than any civil service exam. And on whom is the president's affection most likely to alight? On his fundraisers, of course, and still more on that intimate group of them who can be called cronies. Here Ms Wintour's qualifications are exceptional. As many as two-thirds of the ambassadors Mr Obama has appointed have reportedly been "bundlers," those who solicit dozens or hundreds of contributions to give in one big batch. What a system: Your boss, or someone who does a lot of business with you, lets you know that getting the president re-elected is important to him and that he hopes you feel the same way. Bundling combines the corruptions of influence-peddling with the corruptions of tax-farming. (The president does at least reveal who his bundlers are. Mitt Romney did not.) The present ambassador in London is Louis Susman, a left-leaning retired banker known for his bundling prowess and for rallying to Mr Obama long before it was clear that he could vanquish Hillary Clinton as his party's standard bearer. But Ms Wintour is no slouch. She bundled more than $200,000 for Mr Obama in 2008 and is one of just over 200 people who bundled more than $500,000 this year. What did she get out of this? "It's very rewarding," she told The Daily Telegraph recently, "to see that money can't buy the White House, which is what Republicans were trying to do with all those hundreds of millions of dollars that the Super PACs were raising." As Craig Stapleton, George W. Bush's ambassador to the Czech Republic and France, told The Washington Post when this year's round of diplomatic rumours about Ms Wintour began anew in September: "The most important thing for [foreign governments] to know is the ambassador is close to the president and . . . can get a message to the president in an effective way." In this light, Mr Stapleton, who was married to the president's first cousin, was even more qualified to be an ambassador than Ms Wintour. The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard