Sitting in the quad of an Oxford college, Paul Johnston, the outgoing British ambassador to Ireland who leaves his post in less than a fortnight, talks about “here”, though he refers not to the English university town but to Ireland. “We’d have really been heartbroken at saying goodbye to Ireland,” he says. [ Outgoing British ambassador Paul Johnston appointed to lead Irish Universities AssociationOpens in new window ]So how bad were the bad days? Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times“I got thousands, literally thousands of retweets with people saying: ‘You really understand Ireland. Johnston says James Cleverly, the Conservative who was UK foreign secretary from 2022 to 2023, encouraged his ambassadors “to go native”.
