6th February 2019 Beirut, Lebanon
The Embassy has been celebrating in recent weeks. There was a Wedding – on Saturday night a colleague married, the couple looked radiant, and the party was full of Lebanese life. We’ve had an award from Her Majesty The Queen, who at New Year recognised Lea Baroudi of MARCH for her inspiration in creating peace, […]
19th March 2018 Delhi, India
‘My success will not depend on what A or B thinks of me. My success will be what I make of my work.’ This quote by the namesake of the Newton-Bhabha Fund, Homi J. Bhabha, aptly describes the work of the UK Catapult Centres. Simply put, Catapults get things done when it comes to finding […]
16th June 2017 Skopje, North Macedonia
Earlier this week I had my first one-to-one meeting with Zoran Zaev since he became Prime Minister of Macedonia. It had been delayed by a week because of what we call ‘purdah’, the election-related silence in which British civil servants are not allowed to say anything which might influence voting or government formation. Given the […]
14th October 2016 Kolkata, India
I hosted my first adda last week. An adda is a very Bengali event – it’s a meeting of a group of people to talk about a particular subject. I attended one on my second day in Kolkata organised by the British Council colleagues for the British High Commissioner to India Dominic Asquith who was visiting […]
19th May 2016 Skopje, North Macedonia
I was on Facebook yesterday evening and I saw something that shocked me. It was a post which said that the World Health Organisation only took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders in 1990. I found it hard to believe that anyone over 25 years old has lived in a time when a global […]
16th May 2016 Skopje, North Macedonia
Name me one country where corruption doesn’t exist. You can’t, I know. Corruption exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in every country. And that global reach is one of the reasons behind the Anti-Corruption Summit hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron in London on 12 May. This was no conventional summit limited to Heads […]
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21st May 2015
This week I attended an important conference at the Pontifical Santa Croce University, on “The New Climate Economy. How Economic Growth and Sustainability Can Go Hand in Hand”. It was jointly organised by the Dutch Embassy to the Holy See and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and brought together leading political figures, business […]
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27th May 2014 New Delhi, India
With around 550 million voters deciding the fate of 15000 candidates spanning 500 political parties, India saw the biggest elections in history which lasted over a period of 5 weeks. The result was a clear parliamentary majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and, the new Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi. This is […]
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17th December 2013 Ottawa, Canada
A few weeks ago I attended Trade Minister Ed Fast’s announcement of the Canadian government’s Global Markets Action Plan. Reading through the document, I was struck by the parallels to the UK’s approach to increasing exports…
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4th December 2013 USA
Tomorrow, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer will deliver the UK government’s Autumn Statement. We’re often asked what the Autumn Statement is and how it differs to the Budget? The Budget (usually held in the early Spring) comes at the start of the UK’s fiscal year, which runs from April to March. Budgets set the […]