Ambassador to Austria and UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Vienna
Part of20th September 2017 Vienna, Austria
When I was posted to Vienna in the 1980s, one of my unofficial roles at parties where foreigners were present was, as a German speaker, to go to the door when the police arrived to ask us to turn the music down. The police often arrived at 22.00 after receiving complaints from the neighbours. Generally […]
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14th September 2017 Vienna, Austria
On 14 September the UK joins others in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the formation of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, known as the UNODC. The UNODC was set up in 1997 from a merger between the UN’s Drug Control Programme and the UN’s Centre for International Crime Prevention. Today, the UNODC’s work […]
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11th September 2017 Vienna, Austria
This summer, the British Embassy in Vienna has been running a competition on Instagram (do follow!). Our theme: the UK and Austria. We received 167 fantastic entries. You can see them on Instagram by searching with the hashtag #UKinAustria. After a Stakhanovite effort, with a team of us striving to decide between numerous powerful pictures, […]
6th September 2017 Vienna, Austria
An ambassador punches a horse and gets involved in a fight with the coachman. Two hundred years later, another ambassador in the same city initiates a series of discussion evenings named after his predecessor. Why? Lord Charles Vane-Stewart, Third Marquess of Londonderry, was the first British Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Emperor of Austria […]
21st July 2017 Vienna, Austria
During my first posting in Vienna from 1984-87 I used to travel down the Westautobahn a great deal – often en route to Salzburg, Tyrol or Munich. On the way home, I used to make a pit-stop at a certain motorway service station and consume a cup of hot chocolate. Oddly, as I then saw […]
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14th July 2017 Vienna, Austria
(joint blog with @stevenxhardy, Social Media Manager, FCO) Imagine you are starting a new job where you want to communicate with people using the social media tool Twitter. Your predecessor, who is about to leave, has thousands of Twitter followers, who would doubtless be interested in what you have to say after you arrive. How you […]
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5th July 2017 Vienna, Austria
I was delighted last week to attend the match between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Football Club (“FCO FC”) against the Austrian Foreign Ministry Team (“FC Außenamt”). FCO FC have been touring for years. I hosted them when I was Ambassador in Kiev in 2011 in the beautiful setting of the Dynamo Kyiv stadium when […]
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28th June 2017 Vienna, Austria
How do objects and memories affect each other? I explored these issues in my earlier blog, Things from Vienna? Or Viennese things? One of the costs, or possibly benefits, of of being a diplomat is that every few years you have to pack up everything you own and move to another country. Once you’ve arrived […]
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16th June 2017 Vienna, Austria
The sun blazes down on a red-tiled medieval roofscape. Outdoor tables and chairs and street performers hint at a lively café culture and a burgeoning arts scene. “The Guardian” famously described Graz, capital of the Austrian region of Styria, as “Vienna’s cooler little sister”. As a resident of Vienna who subscribes to Oscar Wilde’s aphorism […]
31st May 2017 Vienna, Austria
Where did Douglas Adams get the idea for his improbably brilliant book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? The answer is… Innsbruck. Eagle-eyed colleagues in the Vienna Embassy have brought to my attention a “Guardian” article of 3 February 2011: Douglas Adams and the cult of 42. The article records a letter of thirty years […]
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