Lord Peter RickettsChair of the Franco-British Council

 Peter joined the FCO in 1974. His early career took him to Singapore, NATO Brussels and Washington, interspersed with stints in London including as a junior Private Secretary to Geoffrey Howe in the early 1980s. In the 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he spent a lot of time in London dealing with the crises in Kosovo, and then the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as Political Director. He was Permanent Representative in 2003, became Permanent Under Secretary at the FCO in 2006,  and was appointed Britain’s first National Security Adviser in 2010. His last post was Ambassador in France.

After retirement in 2016, Peter became a cross-bench member of the House of Lords, where he sits on the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, and  is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. His first book, Hard Choices: What Britain Does Next, was published by Atlantic Books in May 2021.