The last blog I wrote was about the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That seems quite a long time ago. Danny Lopez has written about UN General Assembly week and our many other activities in September. So I wanted to pick up a few themes that don’t get quite as much play in our blogs.
Politics. Under the skin of many–perhaps most–diplomats, you’ll find a wannabe political commentator. We’re paid to know what’s happening in the countries and regions we cover. Those of us working in the US, the UK’s most important bilateral relationship, keep a tight focus on what’s happening–even at state level. It’s hard sometimes not to get fascinated by and immersed in the detail, especially when you have a few headlines running on your doorstep. There was the week or so of intense speculation about whether or not Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey would join the Republican primary field. (He decided against.) And, even this far out, we’re poring over the form book for Pennsylvania, generally the hardest contested of our patch’s three states during a U.S. presidential campaign. I was in Philadelphia last week and as I write, one of my colleagues from the Consulate is in Harrisburg surveying the field.
It may seem early, but in just over 53 weeks, we will know who will be the next President of the US. In terms of putting campaign teams into place, organising the operations at local level–the ground game, if you like the argot-it’s really not that far off. Over this next year, we’ll be looking for the signs, the trends, the ground-truth. How do we do it? The truth is prosaic: we talk to a whole bunch of people, from as many different parts of the political spectrum as possible. Then we sit down as a team and have a slightly-obsessive conversation about what we’ve heard. And then we try to reduce it all to three bullet points for busy readers.
Policy. When we’re not pretending to be journalists, being a diplomat is a lot like driving a cab–by which I mean that we are available for hire by any bit of the UK government that needs our help. Three recent examples include:
– setting up meetings and contacts for Department of Energy and Climate Change colleagues who were presenting the UK’s Green Deal in New York.
– finding legal experts to talk through the Dodd Frank Act with Treasury and Bank of England colleagues.
– giving the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland the chance to press our messages to the influential Irish community in New York.
Three varied sets of policy issues. Candidly, I would not want any of them be my mastermind special subject. We need to know, however, to whom we need to talk on each of them. Which again, involves talking to as many people as we can, to get a sense of the range of views on offer. It’s fair to say that we’re not experts in any single subject–but we do know our city and our states.