Westminster Strategic Studies Group

Focusing on international affairs, with monthly dinners and a membership aimed at younger professionals.

[Westminster Strategic Studies Group @WestminsterSSG]

Are you a sixth form student (or first-year undergraduate)?

Would you like to share with us your thoughts about the future of European security? We'd like to read them.

We’re running our annual essay prize to encourage younger people to think about foreign affairs careers (1/2)

[Georgia Lewis @georgialewis76]

Spent this afternoon on the sofa judging essays for @WestminsterSSG's essay competition with Gen X classics on Now 90s for company. Really interesting stuff on EU security from sixth form and first year undergraduate students.

[Westminster Strategic Studies Group @WestminsterSSG]

RT @PadraigBelton: We're so very grateful to all the very many promising students who entered our essay contest for the @WestminsterSSG Mit…

[Sir Humphrey @pinstripedline]

A noble gesture to a fine man and good friend, taken far too early.

[Westminster Strategic Studies Group @WestminsterSSG]

RT @PadraigBelton: Our valiant @WestminsterSSG member and a better friend to many of us than we ever deserved, Lt Cdr Dr Gabriel Wright RN…

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

Ny utterly amazing friends @lukeharding1968 and @MariaBotcharova are putting together a panel tonight at @frontlineclub on humanitarian aid to Ukraine. 7 pl and still ticketI’m humbled and inspired by how much they both have done to report from Ukraine and also to stand with its people. And also, I can tell you for a fact there is great craic and also Ukrainian vodka in the Frontline bar after (because I left a bit in the bottle).

https://t.co/6t3NuRI8W1

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

As an AvGeek who also is a journalist, I fully enjoyed this from a friend this morning: David Lammy’s argument “you don’t change a pilot half way though the flight” shows he has zero idea of how aviation works

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

This was the visual branding for the European Political Community yesterday. One of Liz Truss’s few contributions to the diplomatic world in Downing Street was to veto anything that looked too close to the EU (so blue, stars, Beethoven, &c).

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

@mariatad It’s 6:50 am in Armenia’s capital. It’s raining. Absolutely miserable. And I just saw Mark Carney running by.

As far as I can tell, he is the *only person* out running in Armenia this morning.

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

@NC_Renic At a bar and ended up chatting with a nice older chap. After a while he took out his book draft on Clausewitz to show us. Where it gets wild is I was drinking with two people who had also written books on Clausewitz. Soon everyone alive will have written a Clausewitz book.

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

*harbour

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

@TheMehOffice @MeghannMyers_ @MadelaineLucyH Britain is the official, legal and diplomatic, term for the combination of Great Britain and this

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

I am really hugely proud, and inspired, by my good friend Chris Jones – who tomorrow will be running 26.2 gritty miles through London to mark the anniversary of the death of Paula Heister – my close friend, my son Liam's adoring godmother, and most of all his utterly amazing wife.

Many people would understandably have turned inward on an anniversary like this, but Chris – who is never not the best of us – is using it selflessly, to raise pennies (an enormous number of them, too) for @braintumourrsch.

This will help not just people who in the future develop brain tumours, but all of us – who have close friends, godparents, spouses. They are the second most common cancer in young adults. And I am so grateful we can all have this chance to support the work of doctors and scientists – just as Paula was both (and many other things besides).

Here is his link, if you might be in a place to make any small contribution: https://t.co/m7h1lhxdU9.

Godspeed through the streets of London, my friend. i will be there at the end cheering my heart out for you.

https://t.co/IKJHiky3KK

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

Paula brought people together, and for the lucky people she chose to be her friend, she threw herself that friendship utterly. She drew people together, and connected the people she loved. Which is why it felt so infinitely right that her father, husband, and close Oxford friends and fencing teammates kept a London pub open a good bit of the way till dawn.

CJ’s justgiving page for @braintumourrsch is on an unbelievable £14,432 last I checked. A seven year-old in Dublin just donated his sweets money.

His run featured in the BBC’s scene-setter at the start of the marathon coverage - and he has also inspired artwork! One, which I was strictly enjoined to give him at the finish line, from Paula’s proud godson...

[Colonel Leona Barr-Jones DL VR @CE_EA_RFCA]

I was delighted to attend the service of thanks giving for @Lord_Lt_Suffolk with Maj Brian Gerrard of @SuffolkACF @EastAngliaRFCA as Lady Clare hands over to Mark Pendlington as new LL

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

tldr: 🌍➕ ✏️ 🟰🏆🎉

[Westminster Strategic Studies Group @WestminsterSSG]

Maybe you might like to tell us your thoughts about defence, diplomacy, trade, alliances, or other threats Europe faces. Make a strong case, and argue for it well. Any approach to the theme is welcome.

We can't wait to read what you write. 

More here:  https://t.co/jjAmQFe7yE

[Westminster Strategic Studies Group @WestminsterSSG]

Are you a sixth form student (or first-year undergraduate)?

Would you like to share with us your thoughts about the future of European security? We'd like to read them.

We’re running our annual essay prize to encourage younger people to think about foreign affairs careers (1/2)

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

This was a rather nice picture of @WestminsterSSG bookwarming (I prefer this to a booklaunch) @DoctorGarethP’s very excellent new Irish civil war history - somewhere between Paddy’s Day and Easter 1916+10. And a few of us (not me) managing to wear green! 💚

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

Roger Casement - who landed on a Kerry beach on Good Friday 1916, and whose statue is my Dún Laoghaire harbour neighbour - is a local lad (born in Sandycove) of whom we can all be proud.

As UK consul general in Rio, he decided it was his job to expose human rights abuses against indigenous Putumayo whom the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company had enslaved to collect rubber for them. He might have been fired for it, but was instead knighted in 1911.

As British consul, he makes it his task to write a lengthy, eyewitness, and exhaustively researched report to the Crown from the Congo basin - one that reveals the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of its people on King Leopold’s rubber plantations. Not every Edwardian diplomat spends their time documenting colonial human rights abuses, but he gets the CMG in 1905 for this.

He lands in Banna Strand ecclesiastically now, 110 years ago, to plea to cancel the Rising, believing (correctly) it will fail. 

His knighthood gets annulled shortly before he is hanged on a comma. (It isn’t entirely clear if the Treason Act 1351 applies to Ireland.) But a nice postscript is Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, in its 1965 decision to repatriate his remains to Ireland, describes him, and here I like to believe pointedly, as Sir Roger Casement.

[Pádraig Belton @PadraigBelton]

Finished a news shift. Had lemons, no tonic, but Cointreau and a truly inexplicable number of @British_Airways gin bottles for #NewTiersEve. 

So quiz: WHAT could I make with these, that is BOTH a tribute to a Great War intelligence network in Belgium, and ALSO a very excellent book by my amazing chum @DrHelenFry?