Leaving, not leaving

My time here is up. For over four years I have been proud to bear the title of the United Kingdom’s Deputy High Commissioner to Australia. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, working with some of the best people I’ve ever met. Large parts of me don’t want to go, but four years is enough, and it’s time for somebody else to take on the best (well, the second best) job the British public service has to offer.

It’s a time for looking back, and for looking forward. Looking back, I think of the visits, the events and the achievements I have been fortunate enough to be a part of. I have worked alongside Governors General, Ministers (Prime and otherwise) and leading business figures, and I have met heroes from Australian and British culture and sport: lunch with Stephen Fry (bucket list tick!), and the discovery that Glenn McGrath is in every sense a gentleman challenged numerous preconceptions. Most importantly of all, I became a dad here; my son Nicholas is now three, and a hulking figure as compared to the two month-premature arrival whose life was saved and nurtured in the Canberra Hospital. My time here has been the best experience, and the greatest privilege, of my life.

But life is not only about privileges; it is about responsibilities, too. My greatest responsibility is to my family. With an Australian mother of advancing years keen to re-settle in her homeland after five decades’ absence, a central European wife who has felt more welcome and at home in Australia than anywhere else we have lived, and a three-year-old son who walks around the house shouting “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” in the middle of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, there was only really one possible next step. The Foreign Office has been kind enough to offer me a period of unpaid leave, so I will be extending my Australian sojourn for a while longer. I do not yet have a job here but I am optimistic about this – it is, after all, the lucky country.

I have worked for the British Government in six countries, across three continents. From the perspective this gives me, I can see exactly how unique the relationship between the UK and Australia is. We do not agree on everything at a political level – and nor should two sovereign nations do so. But for every time we have had to iron out a difference in our views on an international issue, there have been dozens when our shared instincts of fairness, democracy and protecting the rules-based international system have seen us work side-by-side in an attempt to make the world a better place. That’s a good reason for going to work in the morning.

But the relationship between the UK and Australia extends far wider and deeper that the work of the High Commissions in each country. As an example, last night I watched one of my favourite television programmes on the ABC. The Last Leg is compered by the incomparable Adam Hills, an Australian comedian of immense quality and charm (real fans could see him earlier in the evening on a repeat of Spicks and Specks, the Buzzcocks-lite quiz show he used to host; watching the two together shows that quality compering is permanent; hair is transitory). In it, Hills, supported by his English co-hosts Josh Widdecombe and the dwarf[1] Alex Brooker, discuss the oddities of that week’s British politics. So, this is an Australian in Britain commenting on British events, being broadcast in Australia. Countries do not get closer than that. One of the ideas I had here which did not fly was to create a Richie Benaud Memorial Award, to honour the broadcaster who did most to foster the relationship between my two countries. If this existed, Hills would surely be the first winner.

But enough of this. I will now change from being a diplomat to being an expat – for a while, at least. One thing that my extended stay in Australia means is that I will be here for the next Ashes Test Series, for which dates were recently announced. I hope to go to one or two days of this series. If I do, I will be wearing a shirt with three lions on it – that allegiance runs too deep to ever change. But sitting on my knee will be a by-then four-year-old, who I expect will be wearing a green and gold shirt. But that’s okay. We’re family.

[1] Alex Brooker is not a dwarf; this is a reference to a joke in the show. No offence is intended.