25th July 2020
Image ©Aliona Adrianova During my first meeting with Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Simon McDonald in March 2019, when we discussed ideas for the portrait of The Queen that he wanted to commission, I was delighted to hear that he wanted it to feel intimate. He wanted to express Her Majesty’s humanity, rather than creating […]
15th February 2017 Colombo, Sri Lanka
The UK and Sri Lanka are both island nations. This doesn’t mean much, however, when it comes to cyber security. Earlier today, I addressed a group of nearly 50 Chief Information Officers and IT Directors from across the Sri Lankan civil service. This was as part of a project the UK is funding with our […]
16th September 2016 Kolkata, India
It is a cracking first line for a novel: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.* As a thought – that the past is somewhere different – the line sounds very appealing. The past is distant from us and we can’t access it immediately. But the idea is nonsense, of course, […]