I HAVE a high regard for my predecessors as Foreign Secretary from both sides of the House of Commons. Each of them worked very hard at the job.

Geoffrey Howe, who served Margaret Thatcher loyally, first as her Chancellor and then (from 1983 to 1989) as her Foreign Secretary, used to put in extraordinary hours.

There are still folk tales in my office of how his comments in red ink (it's always red ink) on a submission would abruptly finish half-way through a sentence, with an ink line sliding off the page.

He had fallen asleep with the papers on his lap.

But it was also the case that slower communications no mobile telephones, no e-mail made it essential that many overseas trips happened at a slower pace, with more opportunities than today for getting to know one's opposite number and maybe even for manoeuvring a little diplomatic tourism into the programme.

Three things have changed the pace of diplomacy. The telecommunications revolution means that much more diplomacy is handled, in the jargon, "capital to capital" with Foreign Ministers and diplomats working the telephones and the internet.

The growth of international institutions, but particularly the European Union, means that one can see fellow Foreign Ministers for "bilateral" business (i.e. UK to their country alone) in the "margins" (more jargon) of these international meetings i.e. outside the formal sessions.

And then, leading to the greatest change of all, there's the world shattering events of September 11 2001.

Suddenly, and everywhere, foreign policy moved from the inside pages of newspapers to dominate the headlines, day after day, week after week. International terrorism moved from being one of a number of agenda items, to being the number one issue.

September 11 has injected an urgency into diplomacy unknown outside war, and, among many other things it has altered the whole work pattern of the British Foreign Secretary i.e. me!

Take these past ten days. I visited Morocco, Nigeria and Algeria last week, Iraq earlier this week. Many differences, but a common theme. Top of the agenda in each country was terrorism.

Iraq is, of course, currently facing brutal internal terrorism. As I write news has come through of the attacks by terrorists on one of the Shia communities' holiest of shrines in Samarra.

This terrorism will, I am afraid, continue for some time; but meanwhile I am more hopeful about the formation of a government of national unity, following the high turnout elections in December.

These four visits were all pretty speedy examples of modern diplomacy.

But whatever the differences in the pace of work between my predecessors and me, one thing has not changed the absorbing fascination of this job.