Jessica Hand
British diplomat
Jessica Mary Hand (née Pearce; born 1957) is a British diplomat who was the British Ambassador to Angola from 2018 to 2021. She was appointed as ambassador on 21 July 2017 and succeeded John Dennis in March the next year.
Early life and education
Hand is from South Wales from "a family of teachers, undertakers and butchers". She left school after taking her A-levels and worked as a secretary in Barry for two years before going to study international relations at the University of Aberdeen. After graduating, Hand returned to being a secretary as well as working in Cardiff selling wine.
Consular career
Hand joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1985, beginning as a Desk Officer for India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and The Maldives. In 1986, she was moved to be Desk Officer for Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hand was first posted abroad in 1987 to Senegal.
She was recalled in 1990 to be the Head of Economic Sanctions in the UN Department of the FCO and in 1992, the Head of the South Africa Section of the Africa Department. Between 1994 and 1996, Hand was placed on a language training course, becoming proficient in Russian.
“Jessica Hand” enters the record as british diplomat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jessica, Hand and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jessica Hand” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.