Sara: First, tell us a bit about
yourself and walk us through your
background:
What parts of America are covered
by the consulate and what are the
services it provides?
Honorable Karen Bell: I’m a
career diplomat and this is the only
kind of business I’ve ever been in.
I’ve had previous postings counting backwards in Hong Kong, Saudi
Arabia, Nigeria, Canada, India, and
France. I‘m married with two grown
up boys who are either studying or
working in London. I’m here in
Houston with my husband and our
dog, Murray.
The Honorable Karen Bell: We
cover a five-state area. Different people in the office have got different
geographical responsibilities, but our
core areas of geographical coverage
are Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico. The areas
of work we are focused on broadly
divide into three areas. One would
be building the political and governmental relationship that we need in
order to advance UK interests across
Sara: What does a General Consul
in your capacity do?
The Honorable
Karen Bell: Well,
it’s very varied. I
was looking back
across my diary for
the last month just
to give you a reallife snapshot into
the kinds of things
we do and last
month we hosted
a visit to Houston
by our Ambassador to the United
Nations, we have
looked after delegations who have
been in town for the Space Com
Convention, Deisy (Head of Politics,
Press and Public Affairs) and I have
also co-chaired between us two days
of scholarship interviews for a scholarship program we run here from the
consulate. Then there are the usual
things like speaking engagements; I
gave a speech last week on all things
antimicrobial resistant, which is a
global health issue that the UK cares
quite a lot about. Also, given the
events of last month, we reported an
analysis of the election results.
Sara: Tell us about the Consulate General of the UK in Houston.
38 iF Magazine | January 2017
generally with consulates, which is
looking after the interest of the very
many Brits who happen to live near
and around our patch. There are
about 70,000 of them here in Texas and about 40,000 based around
Houston. Fortunately for us, Brits
are mostly a well behaved bunch so
they don’t cause us trouble, but we
provide services such as, emergency
travel documents in the event that
someone has lost their passport and
then in a more serious case where
a person may be arrested, we would
do things like prison visits and that
kind of thing. What we don’t do,
which comes as a surprise to most
people, is issue visas. We got out
of that business
some time ago,
and it’s entirely
an online process
and is managed
for us by a commercial partner.
Sara: What are
some past, present, and future
goals for the UK’s
relationship with
Houston?
the patch. Probably the biggest element of our work would be supporting what we describe loosely as UK
prosperity interest, so some of that is
about old-fashion trade and investment promotion and development.
It is also about building science inno