William Hague and the blue-eyed Bosnian This August saw some hard-hitting rhetoric from the usually silent shadow foreign secretary William Hague on the danger of the Balkans being “slowly pulled apart” by new ethnic tensions. What explains so habitually restrained a statesman’s newly authoritative tone? Likely it’s the influence of Arminka Helic, Hague’s blue-eyed Bosnian Muslim émigré chief of staff, who some feel exerts rather too much influence on Hague’s public pronouncements.