Westminster Strategic Studies Group

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)

*harbour

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

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: justgiving.com/page/marathon-…. Godspeed through the streets of London, my friend. i will be there at the end cheering my heart out for you. bbc.com/news/articles/…

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...

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

tldr: 🌍➕ ✏️ 🟰🏆🎉

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:  westminster-ssg.org/essay-competit…

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)

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! 💚

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.

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?

So very excited about our @WestminsterSSG St Patrick’s Day dinner tonight - @DoctorGarethP is a cracking speaker, and bloke - and we’re so, so very grateful to everyone who’s coming and joining us! (We can always squeeze in a few more, too, if your dance card gets unexpectedly

RT @PadraigBelton: I’m very excited to announce the @WestminsterSSG’s student essay prize for 2026. This is our attempt to encourage stude…

Grateful to be able to meet Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK @ZaluzhnyiUA yesterday in the House of Commons, along with a few of my very most inspiring Ukrainian-British friends.  The @frontlineclub found us Ukrainian vodka after to raise a glass to those indeed at the frontline

I’m very fortunate , at various points in the past decade, to have lived in and reported from Ukraine - a country that today marks four years of heroic survival after suffering full-scale invasion by its neighbour Russia. Sleeping on sofas and kitchen floors from Kyiv to Donetsk,

RT @PadraigBelton: I was so glad to be able to chair a dinner last night to draw attention to the continued struggles of the people of Iran…

RT @mrshoefsmit: That special day when I usually post this and only Irish Twitter appreciate it! #LaFheileBride ☘️

I hadn’t thought I’d find inspiration in the world in 2026, but by God the people of Iran are dishing it out in droves. I am awed. #IranRevolution

Broke up with the USSR because it was a total red flag 🚩

After the King’s speech I’m now on a promise to bring every woman in my family a vyshyvanka back from Ukraine…. #KingsChristmasSpeech