17th July 2025

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6th March 2013 London, UK
In the lead up to International Women’s Day on Friday, we are featuring the stories of women who work for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as guest articles across the FCO bloggers’ network. Carole Johnson is a Team Leader in the FCO’s Global Response Centre (GRC). It operates around the clock, 365 days a year, […]
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6th March 2013
One of the skills a diplomat needs – or, at least, is very useful if they have it – is to understand people. How they think, their motivations, what affects their behaviour, and so on. There is a saying in English that you should try to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”. In other words, […]
6th March 2013
What an experience! I have been fortunate to attend many events in my career to date, but the Northern Future Forum (NFF) is probably the most inspiring experience I’ve been a part of. To get up close and personal to so many Prime Ministers in such an informal setting as the Museum of Decorative Arts […]
6th March 2013 Paris, France

This week on the 8th of March, it’s International Women’s Day, and we are very active in the Embassy in celebrating it. There are two events in particular that I’ve been personally engaged with – and I bring to this a very passionate belief that organisations are better when we have more women in senior […]
5th March 2013
I often host or attend events where we begin by saying that the discussion is based on “Chatham House Rules”, ie any comments made cannot be attributed to individuals outside of the meeting. So it was a great pleasure to host a visit by Lord Williams, the leading Asia scholar from Chatham House (London’s Royal […]
5th March 2013 Lima, Peru
By Cariño Ramos (Plan International) Women represent more than 50% (292 million) of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean, and of that total, more than 104 million are under the age of 19. Young and teenage girls are a particularly vulnerable group in society because of their gender and age. Plan International recently […]
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5th March 2013 Ottawa, Canada
As you may remember, on January 24th, 2013, the Montreal Consulate General (@UKinCanada and @BritsAuCanada), in collaboration with McGill (@McGillU), the Royal Society (@royalsociety) and the Royal Society of Canada (@RSCTheAcademies), hosted a round table on women in Science. Well, the Footage is in and edited and now we can offer you a quick video recap of our Women in Science event: […]
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5th March 2013 Warsaw, Poland
An inspirational speech by HMA Robin Barnett kicked of the recent UKTI Leadership training in Warsaw, part of a two city roadshow from Berlin to Warsaw attracting participation from Heads of UKTI in Europe and the Corporate UKTI training team. The intensive training session is part of UKTIs ongoing change programme to promote UK growth […]
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4th March 2013 British High Commission, Kingston, Jamaica
In the lead up to International Women’s Day, we are featuring the stories of women who work with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Meet Heather Cowley – she’s a Rapid Deployment Team and Cryptographic Support Officer who provides invaluable technical expertise to keep our FCO IT systems secure and enable our diplomats to keep in […]
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4th March 2013
Benedict XVI has stepped down. We await the election of his successor. But life and business at the Holy See, at least for this Embassy, go on – almost as usual. On 1 March, St David’s day, I attended and chaired the afternoon session of a one day conference organised by the Tony Blair Faith […]
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