The Diplomat Who Never Really Left Home

Kenan Poleo came to Istanbul in September 2021 with a briefcase full of trade objectives and a childhood full of Ajda Pekkan records. After more than four years as British Consul General — the most consequential tenure for UK-Turkey commercial relations in recent memory — he has said his goodbyes. TBMag joins the BCCT in saying thank you.

By TBMag International Desk

There is a photograph that tells you almost everything you need to know about Kenan Poleo. He is standing at the top of the grand staircase of the British Consulate General on Meşrutiyet Caddesi in Beyoğlu — a neoclassical building commissioned by Sultan Selim III in 1801, with Scottish crystal chandeliers in its ballroom and the kind of accumulated history that makes the air feel heavier — and he is grinning. Not the diplomatic smile of a man performing contentment. The full, unguarded grin of someone who genuinely cannot believe his luck.

‘This was always my dream job,’ he told Anadolu Agency in one of his final interviews before completing his tenure in early 2026. ‘It is both a joy to have served here, but it is also a tragedy for me that it has to come to an end.’ For a diplomat born in South London to a Turkish Cypriot family — a man who grew up dancing to Ajda Pekkan’s ‘Petrol’, eating yaprak dolma at his mother’s table, and building his ‘family Turkish’ across holidays in Cyprus — Istanbul was never simply a posting. It was, in the most literal sense, a homecoming.

The Ritz Carlton Goodbye

The British Chamber of Commerce in Türkiye marked the end of Poleo’s tenure with a farewell luncheon held at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Istanbul, hosted by BCCT Chair Chris Gaunt OBE alongside Gülten Süzer Gaunt and Mustafa Süzer. The gathering brought together members of the BCCT Board of Directors — a room, in other words, of the people who had worked most closely with Poleo over the past four years and who understand, in granular commercial detail, what his presence meant for the bilateral relationship.

Gaunt’s remarks were precise in their tribute. He highlighted not just Poleo’s diplomatic leadership but the quality of his engagement with the business community specifically — the joint events, the trade delegations, the sector-focused gatherings that had, as Gaunt put it, produced ‘tangible outcomes.’ The word ‘tangible’ is doing a lot of work there, and it is worth unpacking what it actually means.

“There isn’t a sector where we don’t see positive opportunities. But the opportunity is even bigger than that — this is a chance for the UK and Türkiye to set a great example for the whole world.”

The Trade Legacy

Poleo arrived in Istanbul in September 2021 as both Consul General and HM Trade Commissioner for Eastern Europe and Central Asia — a dual role that gave him an unusually wide commercial remit, covering 14 countries from Ukraine to Mongolia, Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. His primary focus, however, was always the UK-Turkey bilateral relationship, and by any measure, the results of his tenure are striking.

When Poleo took up his post, the UK-Turkey trading relationship was already one of the most significant in the region. By the time he left, Türkiye had become one of the UK’s largest trading partners, with the relationship having grown substantially across sectors from health tech to aviation, from advanced manufacturing to clean energy. He was particularly energised by the possibilities in offshore wind — noting that Türkiye’s target of 5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035 offered ‘world-beating’ opportunities for UK-Turkey collaboration — and by nuclear energy, where he saw potential for regulatory and technical partnership as Türkiye advances the Akkuyu plant and develops its small modular reactor ambitions.

One of the most significant milestones during his tenure came at the International Defence Industry Fair (IDEF) in Istanbul in 2025, when a memorandum of understanding was signed paving the way for Türkiye to become a Eurofighter Typhoon operator. Poleo described the deal as a ‘great example’ of what the UK-Turkey strategic and defence partnership could look like at its most ambitious.

But perhaps the most significant piece of unfinished — or rather, just-begun — business is the UK-Turkey Free Trade Agreement update. The first round of negotiations concluded positively, covering goods trade and sustainability, with further rounds expected to focus on services and innovation-driven sectors. Poleo’s enthusiasm for the project was uncontained: ‘The most exciting thing about this new free trade agreement is the opportunity for the UK and Türkiye to set a great example for the whole world around what a modern free trade agreement between two important partners looks like.’ That is a significant statement from a man who spent four years watching both economies from close range.

The Man Behind the Diplomat

Part of what made Poleo an unusually effective Consul General in Istanbul is that the city never felt foreign to him — and that showed in how he operated. He studied African and East Mediterranean Studies at the University of Birmingham and Modern Turkish Studies at SOAS. He served as Regional Director for the UK Science and Innovation Network in Europe, Russia and Turkey. He was Head of Global at Innovate UK. He had worked in NHS commissioning, in EU energy legislation, in manufacturing strategy. He brought a breadth that is rare in diplomatic postings.

But it was the personal dimension that gave him a different quality of access. He speaks Turkish — not diplomatic Turkish, but the warm, slightly gossipy family Turkish of a South London childhood. In his farewell speech at the BCCT luncheon, he switched briefly into Turkish to note, with evident delight, that his language skills had improved enough that he could now follow the family gossip properly: ‘Ailemle dedikoduları anlayabiliyorum.’ The room, one imagines, laughed with genuine affection.

He is also, for the record, a DJ. He loves film and music. He describes lahmacun in Gaziantep as a near-spiritual experience. He calls Istanbul one of Europe’s greatest cities and says that each morning, waking to a view of the Golden Horn, he understood exactly why. His LinkedIn profile, which has over 24,000 followers and places him in the top 1 per cent of the platform in the UK, reads less like a CV and more like the digital diary of someone who has genuinely fallen in love with what he does. That authenticity — rare in any profession, rarer still in diplomacy — is what TBMag wants to acknowledge today.

About the BCCT

The British Chamber of Commerce in Türkiye, founded in 1887, is one of the oldest and most respected bilateral business organisations in the region. Under Chair Chris Gaunt OBE, the BCCT has been a central node in the UK-Turkey commercial relationship — convening trade delegations, facilitating sector-specific dialogue, supporting British businesses entering the Turkish market and Turkish businesses seeking access to the UK. Its partnership with the Consulate General under Poleo has been, by all accounts, one of the most productive in recent years, producing the joint events, market access work, and sustained business dialogue that Gaunt referenced in his farewell remarks. The BCCT’s network spans industry, finance, law, technology, and creative sectors, and its members represent the full breadth of the UK-Turkey commercial relationship.

A Note from TBMag

TBMag exists, in part, because of the conviction that the relationship between Britain and Turkey is one of the most underreported, undervalued, and genuinely exciting bilateral partnerships in the contemporary world. We cover it from the perspective of people who hold both countries in their hearts — Turkish diaspora communities in the UK, British professionals working in Turkey, and the countless individuals and businesses that operate in the space between.

Kenan Poleo, more than any diplomat we can think of in recent memory, embodied that space. He was not a visitor to Turkey who learned the language out of professional necessity. He was someone for whom Turkey was part of his origin story — and who brought that inheritance to one of the most consequential roles in the UK-Turkey bilateral relationship at a pivotal moment.

The FTA negotiations he championed will continue. The commercial partnerships he brokered will persist. The Eurofighter MOU will develop. But the particular quality of engagement that he brought — curious, warm, bilingual in the deepest sense, genuinely excited about the next lahmacun — that is harder to replace, and worth marking properly.

From the TBMag team, and from the British-Turkish community that this magazine serves: thank you, Kenan. Istanbul was lucky to have you. We hope the next chapter brings you many more Ajda Pekkan moments.