MEET our man in Sofia. Nottingham-born Jonathan Allen will become Her Majesty's Ambassador to Bulgaria next year – at the age of just 36.

Mr Allen, whose parents Jeremy and Maggie live in The Park, will be one of the UK's youngest ambassadors.

"We have ambassadors at relatively low grades, but I am pretty young to be going out there," he said.

The former Nottingham High School pupil joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 13 years ago after earning his degree at Cambridge University.

Mr Allen said he is already turning his mind to how he can help his home city and is keen to get Nottingham Forest out to Bulgaria.

About 7,000 Brits live in Bulgaria and a many more have holiday homes in the former Communist state. On top of that, up to 400,000 Brits visit the country on holiday each year to ski or go to the Black Sea coast.

"Looking after them is quite important," said Mr Allen.

Ambassadors are also expected to promote trade and investment to aid the UK's economic recovery.

Mr Allen is already familiar with Notts firms which have a presence in Bulgaria – such as planning and engineering consultancy WYG and Stephen George and Partners Architects, which opened offices in Sofia last month.

He said Eastern European countries provided good opportunities to grow out of the recession.

"As a proud son of the city, I shall be delighted to get Nottingham and East Midlands firms and the chambers of commerce interested in Bulgaria," he said.

"It is really important we get the economic growth we need and therefore [that] we help companies find new markets."

Mr Allen currently heads up the East Africa desk – looking after relationships with Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda and helping those countries prosper.

As one of the youngest senior FCO civil servants, he was faced with the challenge of helping to stabilise Somalia – a country which poses a terrorist threat to the West and has endured 20 years of chaos.

"We are doing what we can to try and increase stability and squeeze out the space used by extremists," he said.

Mr Allen set up a unit to counter al-Qaeda propaganda.

"The question was 'what can we do to counter it without going down the propaganda route ourselves', which would be fatal.

"It was about finding alternative role models, how to expose some of the inconsistences of the al-Qaeda belief. That was an exciting job, putting together people from all walks of life to come up with sensible things we could do.

"There are some very brave people in [communities] up and down Britain who are trying to stand up and fight back, and we were giving them the tools they needed."

Mr Allen began his career focused on the EU and has been posted to Cyprus and Brussels where he was Government spokesman during the UK's presidency in 2005.

He married his wife, Liz, also a civil servant, two months ago. They met while working on terrorist issues.