My next commission for DIPLOMAT magazine is a piece on Diplomatic Ghastly Moments.

All you diplomatic readers out there will have had them. You know what I mean.

That moment when your heart disappears in the general direction of your toes at high speed. When your mouth goes dry as all of a sudden things are … Different.

Some ghastly moments really are ghastly. In my case, for example, the news of a death of a colleague in a helicopter crash in Sarajevo, or getting a phone call to say that Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic had been shot.

But I am after examples of those occasions affecting oneself personally and professionally. Those split seconds when one realises that one has not done something essential, or done something unwise, or otherwise blown it big time.

Such as the moment when I broke the hinge on the briefcase of a member of the Royal Family when tasked with highly responsible and complex job of opening and closing said briefcase. 

Or when I blithely knocked a glass of champagne across the Prime Minister’s table at Number Ten.

Or when I was driving back from a funeral in Warsaw and received a call on my mobile from the Sunday Times. 

Stuff like that. As must have happened to James Hudson when he watched a local Russian TV website. 

All true-life examples asap to mail@charlescrawford.biz, please. Anonymity of course will be preserved in the final article as people request.