Sir Peter Westmacott, KCMG, LVO, is the British ambassador to the United States.
Sir Peter has spent most of his career working in or on the non-Arab Middle East (Iran and Turkey), Western Europe and the Americas. He first joined the Diplomatic Service in 1972. After serving a year in the Middle East Department and completing Persian language training, he was posted to Tehran in 1974. In 1978, he was loaned to the European Commission in Brussels before his first posting to Paris from 1980 to 1984.
After three years as chief of staff to successive ministers of state in London, Sir Peter went to Ankara in 1987 for the first of his two diplomatic postings to Turkey. From 1990 to 1993, he was deputy private secretary to HRH The Prince of Wales. Prior to that, Sir Peter served as counsellor for political and public affairs in Washington, D.C., from 1993 to 1997 before returning to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as director for the Americas.
Sir Peter joined the board of the FCO in 2000 as deputy undersecretary and returned to Ankara as ambassador in 2002. In 2007, he moved to Paris, where he served as ambassador to France until the end of 2011.
Sir Peter was educated at New College Oxford, where he studied history and French.
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