An important day yesterday in my career thoughts. First of all I had a phone call from a former colleague asking if I could make sure his ex-wife gets interviewed for an administrative job that’s open at my work. I duly did so (though I won’t be making the hiring decision so it’s now up to her to impress at the interview stage). Then he told me of his latest scheme to get one of the jobs with the ten new Commissioners to be appointed in May. Interesting but not surprising that he, like me, is looking in that direction; fortunately he’s an economist and I’m marketing myself as a foreign policy expert, so we are not in competition. Like me he had had a look at the list of likely Commissioners and written personally to those he knows (I know only one, but he knows three or four). Then – the revelation – he realised that the ambassadors of each country to the EU are the ones drawing up lists of potential candidates, and so he is writing to them individually. Not a bad idea. I hope to meet next week with the person at the UK Permanent Representation who is responsible for promoting UK citizens as candidates and will check with her to see if she advises this approach.

And at the Liberals’ New Year party last night (which as already noted culminated in drinking some rather nice whisky and whiskey) I discovered that a) the current Dutch Commissioner, a liberal, is tipped to stay on and is a friend of several friends of mine and b) the Finnish liberals think that they will get a turn at having the Finnish Commissioner this coming year, as all the previous ones have been social democrats. Also my friend Sophie has been selected for a fairly safe seat in the coming European parliament elections, which is good news for her. (When her husband left his previous job, I took her out for lunch in order to decide if I should apply for it. She persuaded me not to.)

So things are bubbling away. I’m suffering New Year blues with my current job anyway and getting eager to move on.