Those of you who bother to read these things may well have noticed my earlier posts (here, here and here) about my ambitions to move into the European Commission. By a circuitous route (a friend who is a British diplomat passing on the job notice via his German wife who works at the OECD in Paris) I got word today of an opening in NATO which is rather attractive: the holder of the job “provides background research and draft speeches, articles and other public documents for communication on a wide range of subjects within NATO’s political and politico-military spheres of interest. He/she also works on the preparation of Ministerial meetings, including the drafting of communiques, or other special research projects, and gives briefings. He/she reports to the Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy, is directly available to the Secretary General, and maintains close relationships with other divisions.”
So in fact most of the stuff I enjoy about this job (ie the research and writing short pieces); none of the stuff I hate (the editing long papers by other people); and exchanging the rather generalised medium-to-high level political hacking I do right now for a position as an almost senior adviser to the Secretary General. And then I checked the salary, which three years ago was considerably more than I am getting right now, after tax, if you have two children (and I have three, one of whom is disabled and so probably counts for extra).
The only thing I would have to swallow, really, is that it’s NATO. There’s enough of the Belfast Catholic in me to think long and hard before working for the military. And as far as the Brussels institutions are concerned, my heart is really with the EU. However, the job I really really want within the EU structures doesn’t yet exist, and won’t until the constitution is ratified and there is a proper EU diplomatic service. And this might be a better step towards it than doing yet more Balkan stuff in the Commission.
If I do decide to go for it, some of my more political past postings to livejournal may go friends-only, or disappear!
The visual image of the companion has nothing to do with ‘the compilers of the Annual and the BBC… hoping we had forgotten what (Leela) looked like’. To use the likeness of Louise Jameson would have meant having to pay her some money, and that was obviously beyond the budget of this publication. If I remember rightly, Caroline John as Liz Shaw was the first TV companion to be credited on an annual’s cover (although earlier comic strips in the Troughton books were at least using recognisable photo reference of Fraser Hines as Jamie. But it wouldn’t be until the Davison era when the companions regularly started looking like the actors concerned!
Nowadays, when so much effort is put into maintaining and ensuring the quality of ‘the brand’ across all its merchandise, this would just not be allowed! I mean, the World Distributor annuals didn’t even start using the programme’s logo until 1980 – up until then, you could be forgiven for thinking the Annual was based on a programme called ‘THE DR WHO’!