30th May 2013 Vancouver, Canada
Over the past few weeks I have been telling a lot of people that Minister Alistair Burt, from the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, is visiting Vancouver. He’s responsible for the UK’s relationship with Canada and much besides. This was big news for me, but it seemed to elicit one of three responses…
8th April 2013 Ottawa, Canada
If you watch the news later this week you’ll see that G8 Foreign Ministers will be meeting in London on 10-11 April to discuss global conflict: how to prevent it, how to end it and how to deal with its consequences …
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14th March 2013
Minister for Europe David Lidington visited Romania recently, as I was telling you in my last post. I invited him to do a short video blog about the visit and his vision for the partnership between the UK and Romania. You can also check my Twitter account for a brief recap of the Minister’s key […]
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6th March 2013 Ottawa, Canada
Outside my office there is a wall of portraits of previous British High Commissioners to Canada. I call it, with just a hint of a smile, the “wall of diversity”. As you can imagine, the portraits are all of white men of a certain age…
8th February 2013 Beirut, Lebanon
Diplomats hate making predictions. Churchill once said that you could ignore every other page of Foreign Office advice, because it tended to be in the form of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’. The files are full of pre-election telegrams that hedge their bets. There are good reasons for this. We don’t […]
24th January 2013
Earlier this week, I was in London to attend and address the first ever course run by the Foreign Office on religion and foreign policy. The particular focus was on the issue of freedom of religion or belief, but the wider goal of the course is to help British diplomats understand better the importance of […]
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19th January 2013
The Foreign Office’s Minister Alistair Burt called Romanian Foreign Minister Titus Corlatean earlier this evening to express the British Government’s sincere condolences on the death of a Romanian citizen who was confirmed among the casualties of the terrorist attack in Algeria. I would like to add my own heartfelt condolences to his family and to […]
9th January 2013
As is traditional, earlier this week Pope Benedict XVI received ambassadors from the 179 countries accredited to the Holy See for his New Year’s address on Holy See concerns, interests and recommendations on the main foreign affairs issues of the day. Behind the pomp and circumstance of one of the great annual events of the […]
27th December 2012
“Sadly for me, this Christmas is my last in Rome, as I approach the end of my posting as Deputy Head of Mission at this Embassy. As I prepare to depart in January, this end-of-year moment gives me a chance to look back on my time in this job, and what it has meant for me. To say it’s been a fascinating and busy …
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20th December 2012 Beirut, Lebanon
Each year, many ambassadors send Ministers a review of trends in their country, and thoughts on what lies ahead. To share the more candid elements would be a bit of digital transparency too far, but here is a redacted version of what I have just sent. You can read the rest when it is released […]
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