Denis Keefe CMG

Chairman

Denis has been Chairman of Governors since 2021. He is a diplomat by profession, retiring in 2022 after three years teaching at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.

He joined HM Diplomatic Service in 1982 after grammar school in Essex, an MA in Classics from Cambridge and post-graduate research in Hellenistic Poetry at Oxford. His first posting was to Prague during the Cold War, where he managed the Embassy’s contacts with dissidents, including Václav Havel. He has served in Nairobi, Prague (as Deputy Head of Mission during the Czech Republic’s preparations to join NATO and the EU), Tbilisi (as Ambassador), Moscow (as Minister) and Belgrade (as Ambassador). Denis has worked in London on the EU Single Market, German Unification and relations with China, Japan, India and other countries of the Far East and the Subcontinent. At the Cabinet Office in 2002-3, he led the team drawing up the UK’s first Counter Terrorism Strategy. He continues to conduct research part time for the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and the Cabinet Office in London.

Denis was a Governor of the ECP from 1998-2002, re-joining the Board in 2019. He has six children (four of whom attended primary school in Prague), and speaks Czech.