Quotes About Foreign Office

I am delighted that India will be my first official visit since taking up my appointment as a Foreign Office Minister.

My father worked for the Foreign Office, so he was away a lot of the time. We were a very volatile family. There was a lot of love and a lot of conflict. The conflict kicked in mostly during my adolescence.

Why do I bother having all my stupid opinions? I mean, really, my ever evolving Balkan policy of the mid-1990s - what did I think was going to happen? That I was going to be supersubbed out of Oddbins and into the Foreign Office?

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

I started off in radio, then made little films for Granada. I applied for a job at 'Weekend World,' and they turned me down; I'd also applied to the Foreign Office, which accepted me.

The GCHQ staff were sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team. Reporting these games tested their copywriting skills to the very limits.

Lyons's views on America were generally in keeping with those of the Foreign Office: he was well disposed to its people, but he thought that democracy made the government weak and handed too much power to the violent and ignorant elements of society.

With the prospect of raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.

He throws all the blame on the Jews and the Reds and Eden with his people in the Foreign Office and other politicians, all of whom he would have liked to put up against a wall… if (the Germans) bombed England effectively this could bring peace. He (the Duke of Windsor) seemed very much to hope that this would occur. He wants peace at any price.

Like his other articles on Hitler, Churchill submitted this in advance to the Foreign Office, which asked him to tone it down. He did, a little. When they still complained of its toughness, he published it anyway.

Chequers and No. 10 enjoyed surprisingly haphazard security against assassination and terrorism. John Martin recalled that there was a competition in the Foreign Office to see who could get into Downing Street with the least adequate credentials. A railway season ticket and golf club membership card were runners-up, but 'finally the prize went to a man who walked confidently through the entrance holding out a slice of cake.

Having our own ambassador making these statements about Karimov is acutely embarrassing. It's bad for British business interests, it's bad for the stability in the region. I mean, he sends back these dossiers full of stories of what Karimov's security forces have supposed to have done, he sends them to the foreign office or whatever, he sends them directly to us, I mean does he think I'm going to read it, does he imagine that I'm interested in this stuff?

He was a weedy-looking young man with straw-coloured hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office. He sometimes wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles to correct a slight squint, and through influence he had recently got a job in a museum. His father was a retired civil servant who lived in Essex, where he and his wife kept a chicken farm.

The Foreign Office works hard to remind people of local laws and customs as often they can be very different to British law.

During the early months of the war in 1914 there was a conflict of opinion between the War Office and the Foreign Office regarding news from the Front.

Talleyrand was notorious for taking bribes. But then he was endlessly practical. He liked to lecture the young foreign office clerks on the necessity of masturbating before coming to work, thus ensuring unclouded minds at least throughout the morning.

A Foreign Office diplomat in London wrote in the margins of a Tehran report: "I tend to the view that Musaddiq still enjoys some public support, more than some of our close friends would have us believe. . . . Coup d'état may well be the only answer.

They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.

I think I was brought up with an innate sense of responsibility because my dad was in the Foreign Office where you were in somebody else's country, and you were aware of your behaviour. And my mum worked for the NHS, so you were aware of your responsibility to your country.

'Daughters of Britannia' is a fascinating book, not least because it shines a light on a very dark corner of Foreign Office dealings. Diplomatic spouses are the Aunt Sallys of the foreign service: responsible for nearly everything, recognised for almost nothing.

We need to build on our diplomatic networks, and the unrivalled expertise of our Foreign Office, to project a positive image for Britain as a force for good in the world.