Paddy Ashdown attended a dinner for Boris Yeltsin at Chequers at which, he records, Prime Minister John Major made a banal speech and Yeltsin made an even more banal reply. But he took the opportunity to discuss the situation in the Balkans, one of his own areas of specialty, with David Owen who was at that time the EU co-chairman of the Conference for the Former Yugoslavia. Ashdown thought Owen must be desperate to get out of the mire but he stayed on until 1995. Ashdown himself would become High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002 after standing down from the Liberal Democrat leadership.