Newsroom

Great thanks to your response to the Tet message. I am back to the office and prepared for a busy New Year.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in response to the Tet message. I thought some of the comments were very nice and I was very moved to see such a big response. Thank you everybody! I’m sure David Miliband and sir Alex will be very impressed with the response from Vietnam – the biggest there has ever been to a blog by a British Ambassador! Meanwhile, you can ask Foreign Secretary David Milliband any questions via our Yoosk site until 9 February.

Now I’m back in the Embassy briefly before going on a trip to Thai Nguyen this week, and on the MPS spring trip to Bac Ninh this weekend. I’m also starting to plan my trip back to the UK in March for the annual global UK Ambassadors’ conference. While there, I’ll be visiting different parts of the UK, and am keen to meet up with readers of this blog who are in the UK or Vietnamese students more generally. I hope to make a visit to Hackney to see the Vietnamese community there. If you are interested in meeting me, please send a comment to the blog or email me.

I want to say thanks to the many comments I receive. I’ll try to reply to as many as I can, but if you want an answer on an issue and I haven’t replied yet (sometimes I’m a bit busy!), write to me at mark.kent@fco.gov.uk.

Much focus will remain on the world economy. I’d recommend, for those of you who read English, keeping a close eye on the Economist and Financial times websites . It’s also worth looking at the site of the World Economic Forum in Davos and You tube videos of the debate. London will be hosting a summit to discuss economic issues in April, and the website has already been launched, together with a video from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. You can see more at the London summit website or in the blog posts of my colleague Stephen Hale and a dedicated blog. And for those interested in economic analysis, read the blog of Tom Barry, First Secretary Economic at the British Embassy in Washington. Tom used to work with me at the Embassy in Mexico and is a brilliant economist – and also quite funny….

I’ll try to indicate good material in Vietnamese when I come across it, as I know it can be frustrating to have the material only in English.

To finish with – here’s a picture of Martine and me with Co Nguyet and her family at Tet.

Mark Kent, British Ambassador in Vietnam