Free Life Without Limits, A by Chrissie Wellington Page B

being obsessed with canals, we had many conversations in praise of the Great British Holiday. She is very sharp and knowledgeable, with a good command of her brief. You didn’t have to spoon-feed her the policy lines. We worked some very late nights, particularly as the Summit, which was to be held in September, approached. And it was during the preparations that I met a girl called Georgina Ayre, who is now one of my best friends. She was a representative for Stakeholder Forum, an NGO, and a fellow runner, whose appetite for whirlwind activity may have exceeded even my own.
    In September, we set off for the Summit in Johannesburg. All the great and the good were there, with the notable exception of George Bush, whose representatives did their level best to throw a spanner in the works at every turn. I met Tony Blair, who was surprisingly tanned and very charismatic. This was pre-Iraq, so I let him have his picture taken with me.
    The timing of it all was wonderful for my career prospects. I was gaining first-hand experience of a high-level UN conference that took place only once every ten years. At one point, I found myself leading for the Government in a meeting with some Nigerian ministers. My superior, Andrew Randall, couldn’t go, so I was sent instead. Everyone was so busy that opportunities like that would often come up. If anything needed to be done, my hand was the first in the air.
    So there I was, with five Nigerian men of high standing, imparting the UK lines to take, finding common ground, trying to sway them towards our position wherever I could. There were quid pro quos, fall-back positions, bargaining chips. I was negotiating with international statesmen on behalf of my country. Nine months earlier I had been selling Christmas cards. Surreal isn’t the word. I felt much the same as I was going to feel five years later when I took the lead in Hawaii for the first time, a few months after turning pro: a bit of a fraud. As if I were looking down on someone else doing it. Surely somebody would overtake me . . .
    But it wasn’t all negotiating with statesmen. I had an awful lot of photocopying to do as well, not to mention collating papers for ministers to take into negotiations. All of this gave me an intimate knowledge of the brief. There was no cutting and pasting; I knew it all off by heart, which meant I could walk into a room and fill in for someone higher up the pecking order.
    Overall, the conference was deemed a success for the UK Government. All of the relevant departments were out there, but as the team leading the delegation it was also deemed a success for EPINT. From my own point of view the agreements established did not go nearly far enough, but there were 190-odd countries present, so a radical consensus was never going to be reached and probably never will be. The fact that one was reached at all was an achievement. The agreements were on too many aspects of development to go into here – they were on every issue you could possibly think of. But the key was always going to be the implementation. If the agreements are not integrated into government policies and action, it just becomes rhetoric. At EPINT, our job was to make sure they were.
    On a personal level, the Summit was a great success for me. I was one of a few who were awarded bonuses by Margaret Beckett afterwards. All the ministers have an apartment in Whitehall, and she held a party for us at hers, above Horse Guards Parade, as a thank-you for our efforts.
    Over the next couple of years I got to know her quite well. I wrote speeches for her and for the Environment Minister, Michael Meacher. I recall one particular instance at a UN conference in New York in 2004, when I was called to her hotel room to brief her in person. Unfortunately, my computer had just crashed, and I’d lost the document. I was absolutely terrified, and had to brief her from memory. But it all went really well, and we went out afterwards and got drunk on