During my career as a minister I've been to thousands of meetings.
Apart from the many which I have in my office with my team in the Ministry of Justice, there are always a host of others - Cabinet, government committees and more.
I also go over to Brussels regularly to meet justice ministers from other European Union countries to discuss how we can all co-operate on ways of better protecting the public.
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But my overseas travel is nothing like as regular as it was when I was Foreign Secretary, for obvious reasons.
And that, of course, meant many more meetings.
I'd like to make a confession. At times during these European Union meetings, I got bored.
Sometimes I was irritated, even driven to distraction by some tedious discussion of a small element of policy.
But I used to reassure myself with the thought that getting bored in meetings was a small price to pay for what the European Union has provided for us all - most importantly, peace in Europe.
It's a point which is often overlooked in the debates over the EU.
Before its development, before the strong institutional structure it has given Europe, many arguments between countries were resolved by death and destruction.
Sitting in a few tedious meetings is well worth the time and effort given the alternatives.
This point about the importance of the EU was underlined for me this week in a discussion with my Cabinet colleague Hilary Benn, who has just returned from a meeting in Bali with representatives of 180 countries.
The outcome of the meeting - no tedious event this - was an historic agreement on climate change, an agreement in which for the first time all the countries of the world agreed to start negotiations on a new deal to cut global emissions.
It's important stuff and it's going to be hard-going, but the stakes couldn't be higher: as Hilary said last week, if we fail to tackle climate change, every single human being in the world will be affected.
I was particularly struck by something else he mentioned, that without the European Union, this deal would not have been possible.
He's absolutely right - the benefit of working as a big bloc could hardly be better illustrated, because the plain fact is that if we were trying to negotiate this alone, it would have been extremely difficult.
-It's one of the many reasons why the EU benefits us all.
The future of the EU will be high on the agenda in the New Year, with Parliament debating the new treaty which will reform the way it works now that its membership is 27 (compared with 15 just 12 years ago).
One of the things which is regularly overlooked in this is that under these proposed changes our ability to influence decision-making in the EU will actually increase.
Under the complicated rules affecting the union, member states are allocated voting powers based on their population but progressively weighted in favour of smaller countries.
Our current voting power is 8.4 per cent. Under the reform treaty, much maligned in many quarters, that power increases to 12.3 per cent - which is good news in terms of influencing future key decisions.
The influence of the world's greatest newspaper, serving the world's finest town, stretches far and wide.
My column on greetings cards in last week's Lancashire Telegraph has received a great deal of coverage.
I'm glad about that, because we should be completely unashamed about how we send out good wishes to one and all at this time of year.
So once more, and with gusto, a very Happy Christmas to you all.
Posted by: Dave, Feniscowles on 5:59pm Fri 21 Dec 07
Sad old Jacko. As he and his party continue to give away Britain's sovereignty we should be looking at making him and his ilk redundant. After all, as 70% of our laws are now made in Brussels there really is no need for most MPs at all. Think of the saving. If we just carried on and worked on a full dictatorship we could save even more.
Sad old Jacko. As he and his party continue to give away Britain's sovereignty we should be looking at making him and his ilk redundant. After all, as 70% of our laws are now made in Brussels there really is no need for most MPs at all. Think of the saving. If we just carried on and worked on a full dictatorship we could save even more.
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