Some familiar faces come to the fore.
In the aftermath of the UK general election, some of the backstage participants in the campaigns came to the fore – and they proved to be familiar faces to Brussels observers.
Edward Llewellyn, chief of staff to David Cameron (now the prime minister), used to work for Chris Patten, when he was European commissioner for external relations, and for Paddy Ashdown, when he was the EU’s man in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On the Liberal Democrat side, Alison Suttie, the campaign manager for Nick Clegg (now the deputy prime minister), was once spokeswoman for Pat Cox, the president of the European Parliament, and later worked for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group as director of forward planning. She will now be working for Danny Alexander, the minister for Scotland in the new government.
One of the earliest decisions of the new government was to create a national security council and the civil servant in charge of the foreign office, Peter Ricketts, was appointed to a new position of national security adviser. The man appointed – at least temporarily – to fill the vacancy created at the top of the foreign office is Martin Donnelly, who was in Brussels in 1989-93 as a member of the office of Leon Brittan, a former European commissioner. Also in the Brittan team at that time were Catherine Day, now the Commission’s secretary-general, and Jonathan Faull, the Commission’s director-general for justice, freedom and security.
A graduate of the College of Europe, Donnelly was from 1998 to 2003 number two in the European secretariat of the UK’s Cabinet Office, so he is supposed to know how Brussels works.