Risultati di ricerca
6 lug 2016 · As deputy head, I lead the FCO's diplomatic support to UK businesses overseas. I manage three teams covering commercial diplomacy and business outreach, market access and economic openness and trade policy, so it's a wide-ranging agenda.
5 lug 2016 · As a spokeswoman for occupying government forces in Iraq, Victoria Whitford's job was to tell the press what was happening - even when the news was grim. She says she was honest but that others...
- 3 min
- Wanting A New Life
- I Had Loved The Foreign Office
- The Reality of The Foreign Office
- Working on Hostage Negotiations
- When I Discovered The Missing Piece
- A Visit to India
- Realising What I Wanted For My Children
- My Old Dream, Not My New One
- How I Started Again
- How Do You Fund A Brand New Life?
In 2011, I returned from a posting to India. I called my friend Bianca, who I studied with at Oxford back in the day, and who is now a GP, having graduated with an English degree and worked as an acupuncturist and yoga teacher. “I want to become a doctor,” I told her. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Why would you want to take your brilliant career in t...
I had once loved my work in the Foreign Office – an organisation I still feel somewhat attached to, a prodigal daughter who will not return. I spent two years in Kosovo, talking over coffee and cigarettes with former Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers and politicians fighting for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. In January 2004, I travelled to Iraq,...
The reality was, of course, different. I remember General Kimmett, the US Army spokesman, rebutting an Iraqi journalist who complained about the terrifying roar of Coalition helicopters patrolling over Baghdad: “The sound of those helicopters? That is the sound of freedom”. The echoing cool darkness of the green marble inside the lofty circular atr...
In October of that year, Margaret Hassan, a British-Irish humanitarian worker, was kidnapped by armed men on her way to work. Within hours, a specialist hostage negotiation team from the Metropolitan police flew to Iraq. I met them in Kuwait, on my way home from a week’s leave, and we took the British RAF Hercules transport plane into Baghdad. As t...
In May 2005, I was posted to the US. I must have had post-traumatic stress disorder, as I remember being terrified of fireworks and at one point believing there were masked men in black who were about to mount an assault on my Dupont street apartment in Washington D.C. After a year in Bush’s State Department, I got a scholarship to Princeton to stu...
I moved to India and started my next job, focused on India’s relationship with Pakistan and the conflict over Kashmir. Dressed in shalwar kameez and headscarf, I travelled to downtown Srinagar to talk with politicians and local activists, the light of idealism shining in their eyes. My police security detail hovered obtrusively nearby. An English t...
I was 38 and I wanted to be a good mother to my children, in the sense described by the psychoanalyst Winnicott – present, nurturing, providing love and security. I was not sure if I could do this while living overseas, out most evenings, schmoozing politicians and business people, “dining for Britain” as we jokingly used to call it. I wanted my ch...
I grew up in Grimsby, a working-class girl from a proud, dysfunctional and not financially fortunate family. Going to Oxford and working for the Foreign Office had once fulfilled a dream: I could travel around the world, doing something I believed in. But now I felt trapped, no longer independent, far away from the people I’d imagined I would help....
I started volunteering for a charity, Single Homeless Project, cooking a weekly meal with young men and women who had lived on the streets. I did a course on psychoanalytic theory at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. When I said I wanted to become a doctor, my tutor took me seriously – “all metamorphoses happen slowly”. I bought some A-level science...
The next problem was how to finance this endeavour – and how to bring around my long-suffering husband to this plan. He was opposed, and I didn’t blame him. He married me when I was a British diplomat and part of him looked forward to gin and tonics on the lawn as the Ambassador’s husband at some point in the future. Instead he found himself suppor...
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View Victoria Whitford’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members. Deputy Head, Commercial and Economic Diplomacy Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office ·...
- 165
- January 1, 2014
- Foreign and Commonwealth Office
- London, England, United Kingdom
5 lug 2016 · As car bombs and mortars hit Baghdad in 2004, Victoria Whitford worked as a spokesperson for the occupying governments in Iraq.
Victoria Whitford, 47. Victoria was a successful diplomat, working for the British Government in Pakistan, when she had an epiphany that she was doing the wrong job.
