10th February 2015
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
This week a colleague said something that really resonated with me: “We are the first generation in history that could end extreme poverty, and the last generation that still has time to avert extreme climate change”. No pressure then. It’s certainly both an exciting and sobering prospect. We live in an era of such great […]
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22nd December 2014
Paris, France
So this is the time of year when I look back at what we’ve achieved and 2014 will stay in my mind a long time as a year of anniversaries. We’ve had the 20th anniversary of the Channel Tunnel, and the Queen unveiled a little plaque to commemorate that at Saint Pancras when she was coming […]
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8th December 2014
Paris, France
I’m really proud that the British Council team here in Paris have been leading the campaign with the Council to remember the football truce, that extraordinary moment around Christmas of 1914 when British and German soldiers got out of their trenches around Ypres (but we think also in some areas in France) and ended up […]
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12th November 2014
Paris, France
I had the great good fortune to participate in two very different ceremonies to commemorate this 11th of November a hundred years after the start of the First World War.
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20th October 2014
Paris, France
Two hundred years ago this week, the British Government paid Pauline Borghese 800,000 Francs for this wonderful house behind me, the Hôtel de Charost. And it has been the British Ambassadors’ Residence ever since then.
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1st October 2014
Paris, France
The British actress Emma Watson is a UN Ambassador for women’s issues and she made her first speech at the UN a few days ago, launching a campaign on gender equality. I think she put her finger on a very important point, which is that gender equality is not a woman’s issue, it’s a man’s […]
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24th September 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
It’s the seventeenth anniversary of my first visit to the OECD. Back in September 1997 I accompanied my Treasury colleague Tom Scholar (now our Prime Minister’s G8 and G20 Sherpa) to Japan’s Economic Survey meeting, as I was about to take up my first diplomatic posting in Tokyo. It was one of the best days […]
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12th September 2014
Paris, France
Today I represented the UK at the commemoration of the Battle of the Marne, which raged for 5 days from 5 September 1914 and was one of the turning points of WW1. From the start of the War in early August, the German Armies advanced relentlessly across Belgium and into France. The French forces, and […]
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1st September 2014
Paris, France
Rummaging in my library, I found the following blog-post left by my predecessor, with remarkable prescience, to be posted exactly 100 years later! It recounts a dramatic meeting that really did take place in the Residence on 1 September 1914 directly related to the conduct of the War, and in which my predecessor took a […]
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25th July 2014
Paris, France
Now we’re in the summer season, millions of British people, literally, come to France every year, and almost everyone has a wonderful holiday. That’s obviously what we want in the Embassy as well.
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