Liberal Democrat Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne  in the Guardian about the Coalition’s strategy to prevent torture throughout the World and about the independent enquiry which will investigate whether Britain was implicated in torture after 9/11: We know that we face a long and difficult road ahead. But our vision is for people to be

If Muhammad won't come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Or so goes a saying popularised by Francis Bacon. It seems Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, has taken this to heart and decided to move his entire Department — DfID — closer to the Foreign Office, MoD and, of course, No 10. After years of relishing its location — both geographically and fu...

Condemnation’s coming from all sides for the £963,000 bonus awarded to RBS’s Stephen Hester, on top of his £1.2 million salary. The most prominent denunciation came from Lib Dem Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne on last night's Question Time: ‘I think there’s a sort of question of honour. Even if there is a contractual opportunity for him to have a bonus,...

In London and across the country, preparations are reaching fever pitch. As Minister for the Olympics in the Foreign Office, I have been involved in the planning and preparation since May 2010. While many people are excited about the torch relay across the country and the huge variety of sporting events, the Olympics also offer

The Egyptian dictator toppled by a popular uprising in February was assessed by foreign office officials to be "free of any taint of corruption" before he came to power in 1980.

The Foreign Office has kindly responded to my Telegraph piece from last week, which suggested that they could do more to confront the religious cleansing sweeping the Middle East. In an extended version of a letter he has sent to the paper, the Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt says that his department is doing plenty: ‘Concrete examples include: Iraq, where the Prime Minister and Foreig...

William Hague has transformed the Foreign Office in his 18 months in charge. He inherited a system hardwired with the dynsfunctionality of the Labour years, and it’s almost fixed. But not quite. It has not yet woken up to the wave of what can only be called ‘religious cleansing’ in the Middle East, which I look at in my Telegraph column today. Here’s a rundown of my main po...

To reinforce British diplomats’ wilful blindness, the Foreign Office has closed half a dozen embassies in Latin America in recent years, to minimise the danger of receiving subversive opinions from foreign capitals. All part of Britain’s national decline. Erm, isn’t that in fact the flip side of the European Diplomatic Service? Replacement of individual country

A provocative decision by a powerful South American trading bloc to ban boats with a Falkland Islands flag from docking at ports will only "damage" the local economy, the Foreign Office has said.

From an interview the Liberal Democrat Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne gave the Evening Standard this week: I think there is a danger that we are defined by a relatively small set of issues that are relevant and significant but do not give a rounded picture of what the Liberal Democrats are in government in