Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

I very much agree with the last point—that the Foreign Secretary should sit in this House. We always enjoy the Mandelson speech from the shadow Foreign Secretary—I hope there is a lot more of it to come—and we always enjoy the European Union speech from him, because he always confuses it with the Oxford union. Can he tell the House whether he had any contacts at all with the ruling centre-right parties of Europe on those two appointments?