Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it’s a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

Coalition will come sooner or later, I'm certain of that.

What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.

We have to make their livelihoods viable, get them the proper prices for their produce, try and make them stay rather than sell their property and leave again.

I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do.

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.