Winter 11 Featuring: The Buckingham Palace Awards Ceremony ...

‘I would not have rubbed shoulders with
Putin, Arafat and Mandela!’
Elliot Beard at the Buckingham
Palace Celebratory Dinner
February 2011
Although it may sound like hyperbole or exaggeration, the
ESU and its programmes really do change the lives of
young people. Forever. In my own case, the things that I
have done and the thing that I am doing now, would likely
not have been possible but for the time I spent on Capitol
Hill in 1998 on an ESU scholarship.
When I got to Capitol Hill in the summer of ‘98, I was sent
to the office of Congressman Ed Royce of California.
Congressman Royce was the head of the House Africa
Sub-Committee and, at the time, he was a co-sponsor of a
bill going through Congress called the ‘Africa Seeds of
Hope Act’. The bill was facing virulent opposition from
certain constituencies and Congressman Royce, one of its
chief proponents, found himself making several
impassioned speeches in its defence. Part of my role was to
aid the Congressman’s speech writer, Gregory Simpkins, to
write these speeches. I learned so much from Greg about
how to write the spoken word and how to craft powerful
rhetoric which would hopefully persuade and encourage
initially unsympathetic minds to our cause.
I left Capitol Hill that summer a different young man. A
young man filled with ambition and enthusiasm for a bigger
life outside of Scotland. Imbued with a sense of the wider
world around me, I applied and won a scholarship from the
St Andrew’s Society of the State of New York the next year
which sent me to do a Masters at New York University in
Manhattan. Whilst there, my experience with Congressman
Royce was what helped me persuade Hillary Clinton’s
Senate campaign team to hire me as their first intern (a role
I turned down to intern with Global Strategy Group in
Manhattan who were involved with Al Gore’s 2000
presidential campaign pollster Harrison Hickman). Without
my ESU scholarship, I would not have had those fantastic
opportunities.
A year later, I found my ESU experience on Capitol Hill
catapulting me to the 38th Floor of the UN building on
1st Avenue in New York City, where I worked as a speech
writer for Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN. The
team was small (I was one of five speech writers) and I got
to write sections of important speeches on the Middle East,
global economic policy and UN peacekeeping. I also got to
rub shoulders with world leaders including Vladimir Putin,
Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela. No doubt, it was a role
that many talented young people applied for but I was able
to persuade the team that because of my time on Capitol
Hill and the speech writing experience I had there, I was
best suited for the role.
I left New York City in 2002, went to law school in London
and Oxford and am currently a senior associate at the City
law firm Herbert Smith. My experiences in the US as a
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