New FCO blogger: Kosovo calling

Another new FCO blogger: this time it’s Ruairi O Connell, Deputy Head of the British Office in Pristina. ‘We are where we are,’ he writes in his first posting, putting his diplomatic training to good use. Sky News foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall is rather more forthright on his excellent blog: the ‘last question’ in the Balkan Wars, namely the fate of Kosovo, is about to be thrashed out one way or the other. Serbia is midway through a two-round Presidential election, with the ‘ultra, and I mean ultra-nationalist’ candidate winning round one; round two takes place on 3 February. An insight from the UK’s Embassy-in-waiting could be very timely indeed.

I note, incidentally, that two senior FCO people spoke on Wednesday at a conference on ‘Transforming Public Sector Communications’, one giving a case study on the FCO’s blogging initiative. Would have been nice if they’d written some of it up on one of the various blogs.