Speech and Other Writing

As well as surging into the Total Politics Top 200 UK Political Blogs this blog has made it into the Top 20 UK Libertarian Blogs.

I achieved a more than respectable 11th place, amidst distinguished company.

Since the libertarian trend in all its many varieties is the shape of the future, this is a great result.

Many thanks to all readers who kindly took the trouble to vote for this blog in this category. If you have not yet done so, have a read of my Well-Armed Red Riding Hood story. 

Its (and, on a good day, my) philosophy: Strong, Thoughtful and Generous.

Back in late 2005 Guardian prima columnista Polly Toynbee was urging the case for Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair:

From now on, the economy will turn upwards and there is no need for Labour to panic - yet, of course, they will. Faced with bad polls, there will be growing pressure for Blair to announce his departure by next autumn's party conference.

... Labour's man needs to arrive as fresh, surprising and progressive as Cameron now seems. People worry how this puritanical and somewhat dour chancellor can stand up against the ebullient, debonair young prince. But age and style have nothing to do with it. It is the brightness and the content of their policies that matters.

And, lo, in 2007 it came to pass that Gordon Brown was poised to become Prime Minister:

A 10-year chancellor must leap out of the starting gate like a fresh contender. He must electrify the stale air with new ideas and new directions strong enough to reach right down to these jaded roots. That takes high voltage jolts of surprise and optimism.

Then, it happened!

There was something stunned about Gordon Brown's expression as he stood on the threshold of No 10. He looked genuinely awestruck, as if the hugeness of the weight that had just fallen on his shoulders had taken him by surprise.

Mere weeks later it was all going wrong:

There is a stunned disorientation among Labour MPs, alarmed by both Brown's vision void and his sudden incompetence ... The backbenches sat through Darling's politics-free performance on Tuesday like the Animal Farm beasts gazing through the farmer's window in the final scene. Far too late they realised something awful was happening before their eyes: you could have cut their silence with a knife.

Then it was all down:

Maybe he hasn't the character, the toughness, the fibre, the daring. He was always the Macbeth who failed to wield the knife. In those waiting, plotting years of half-cocked conspiracies, a Lady Macbeth would often have shouted: "Infirm of purpose!"

And down:

A year ago, this week's cornucopia of good policies would have signalled the truth of Gordon Brown's words as he stood outside Downing Street and said: "Let the change begin." If these had been his opening salvos, if these had signalled his clear direction of travel, he might not now be sinking fast ... Now it is late, a whole year too late. Is anyone still listening?

Which brings us to today:

The smell of death around this government is so overpowering it seems to have anaesthetised them all. One bungle follows another and yet those about to die sit silently by...

Unseating a prime minister is very high risk - but a dying party should be ready to take dangerous medicine if that's the last chance left.

On 29 June 2007: as they stepped into No 10 yesterday, here was as decent and clever a team of ministers as ever graced the cabinet table.

Now they are ... a cabinet of minnows.

It's tough being a cheer-leader, waving those glittery pom-poms and smiling brightly as your team collapses and the crowd laughs both at the players - and at you.

The Oxford Webware maestros are helping me liven things up a bit round here.

 So (within the frugal limits of my ability to recall how to do it) there could be easier YouTube links and more pictures now and again.

Some people ask me, "Did you really have a Mini in your living room on the first floor in Warsaw?".

Indeed. This is how it got there:

And this is what it looked like driving in:

And the launch itself, just as the curtain hiding the car was pulled back to general amazement and wild acclaim:

Made a change from the usual diplomatic cocktail party.

At some point I hope to 'embed' a link to Chris Muir's terrific daily cartoon strip, Day by Day.

It features four Americans opining wittily on life and politics, not least a curvy young Democrat feminist and her cool dude dark-skinned Republican boyfriend.

But others have good walk-on parts. For example, in the latest episode we see Hillary.

This (via Daniel Hannan) is absolutely grotesque.

What are we being reduced to?

And why are we paying taxes to subsidise the madness of thought leading to such a pernicious, creepy document being even considered, let alone written?

The UK's Top Political Blogger scores an embarrassing own-goal.

Success.

This website has stormed from a standing start in January this year into the Total Politics Top 200 UK Top Political Blogs list, at position 161.

Not as good as, say, position 156.

But notably better than, say, position 166.

And rising fast next year, in hot pursuit of famous former Ambassador turned blogger Craig Murray who is at position 145, down from position 44 in 2007.

August has been much my best month so far, with some 9000 unique visitors.

Many thanks to all those who both like the product - and have taken the trouble to vote.

From Fred Thompson.

That fellow Spengler sure has a way with words:

Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers.

The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths...

... Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it...

... The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president...

... McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse.

Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.

Plus, of course, maybe "vote for Obama or there'll be a full-fledged race war" is not an argument designed to appeal to voters in many parts of the USA.

The Times has two noteworthy pieces on Georgia and its ramifications today.

Bronwen Maddox weighs in on the EU's defiant chihuahua-like stance:

... even though the EU should rightly settle for the lowest common denominator on such important questions of its own identity, the proposals were weak beyond parody. “The Union will remain vigilant,” a version of the text said yesterday, adding that the review “may lead to decisions on the continuation of discussions on the future of relations between the Union and Russia in various areas”.

Yap!

Sir Christopher Meyer (formerly HM Ambassador in both Bonn and Washington) throws in some provocative if not eccentric observations, arguing that the best way forward for Europe is to go back to 'spheres of influence' of the sort agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Christopher (as befits a distinguished former FCO Press Secretary) has some excellent lines:

The supreme fallacy in foreign policy is to take the world as we would wish it to be and not as it actually is. In Britain's case, the delusion is compounded when we are powerless to effect the outcome we desire. This has been particularly the case with Russia, where we have managed to be both impotent and provocative.

If we really want to put a halt to bad Russian behaviour, let us do so where we can make a difference, and where it is justified - starting with the expulsion of the vast nest of Russian intelligence officers in London, as Labour and Conservative governments did not hesitate to do in the 1970s...

...The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West's protestations of pacific intent as it pushes Nato and the EU ever eastwards.

Most important of all, Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. Mr Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war.

Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.

Oh dear.

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the most recent attempt to divide Europe into 'spheres of influence', ie the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact. That did not work out so well.

More generally, why do intelligent Western commentators emit as if on autopilot the cliché about Russia's 'fear of encirclement'?

Goddamit, Russia sprawls across 11 time zones. Its 17m square kilometres  'encircle' much of the planet.

A country that size has a lot of neighbours, many of whom have good reason to be uneasy about the weight of Russia bearing down on them. Why oh why do the alleged anxieties of Russia mesmerise us more than those of everyone else, especially when history shows Russians dumping mercilessly on smaller nationalities and not the other way round?  

Keep an eye too on absolute economic weight.

Thus EU and USA GDPs combined amount to some 70 million million US dollars (nominal).

Russia with all its oil wealth has a puny 1.3 million million or so of GDP, notably less than Spain.

Scary, huh?

The problem with the Meyerish analysis is that 'Russia's national interest' (as assiduously choreographed by generations of Communists and now Putinist Communists-Lite) defines itself as including a right to subjugate/humiliate/oppress anyone in the neighbourhood.

So, with whom do we side?

The bully swaggering round a big corner of the global schoolyard? Or the little kids he duffs up on his rounds?

Does that bully really deserve his own 'sphere of influence' which he himself chooses?

The EU appears to find that question All Too Difficult.

Here is a foreign policy classic moment:

"We have to find a balance. The balance is between tough talk and economic consequences. My stance is yes to tough talk. No to economic consequences," said Alexander Stubb, Finland's foreign minister.

The point, of course, is that tough talk backed by no consequences (economic or otherwise) is not in fact tough.

It is merely a passing silly noise.

Full of sound, but no fury. And signifying nothing much.

The world takes another step towards the Internet Cloud as Google launches its new browser Google Chrome.

We, the vast mass of mere users, have almost no idea of what is happening to deliver these miracles of networked cleverness.

Here (via Charles Johnson) is as simple an explanation as we might hope to understand.

(Oh, and while you are passing by LGF, have a look at this dude, an Obama supporter baffled by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, and not afraid to say so.)

I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can't say once they leave the FCO. See eg here.

Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules:

The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public comment - written, broadcast, in press articles, books, school debates - reflecting their career experience. This is not about official secrets. It is an attempt to convert a career-long professional duty of personal discretion into submission to censorship until death...

The worrying thing is not only regulation 5 but its vague scope and application. My part-time job was withdrawn hours after I commented on Radio 4's Today programme and in the Guardian about the government's suppression of the SFO's inquiries into BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia damaging the credibility of its policies on good governance and corruption. This action reinforced my point.

... The FCO must rethink regulation 5 again, this time with more respect for freedom and for informed discussion of foreign policy. It should also publish its regulations: officials have a right to know which of the limitations on their liberty that they accept on joining the FCO will endure when they leave; citizens should also know by what decrees they are denied access to the views of former public servants.

Of course officials already do have the right to know these 'limitations on their liberty'. And is there really an issue about such Rules being published for the edification of the public?

Strive as I do to be indignant about all this, I fail.

Here I am, more recently retired than Edward Clay, blogging and writing away, often in a way highly critical of HMG positions. Yet I clear nothing with the FCO in advance, nor have they made any attempt to shut me up.

So in practice the impact of the Rules is not necessarily 'draconian', although I am not revealing/analysing operational decisions by Ministers on a highly controversial topic such as the decision to invade Iraq.

This is where Sir J Greenstock's book on Iraq has been left in the fridge. See his own characteristically gracious and sensible views in this lively exchange.

And whereas I suspect almost every serious serving diplomat accepts reasonable limitations on how far sensitive information gleaned during a career is published afterwards (and when), any such limitations are bound to be 'vague' to some degree.

The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

• weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants' memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
• a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society.

Prompted by Karadzic's transfer to ICTY, here in the new issue of Total Politics is a piece from me on my encounters with two other Bosnian Serb leaders convicted by ICTY for crimes against humanity.

What are these people like?

Are they obvious monsters? If not that, at least patently weird? Or seemingly normal people who somehow ‘lost it' on a massive scale?

Read on ...

Back in quite deep Oxfordshire from Orlando, via a horrible early morning experience today at T4 at Heathrow.

The sheer shabbiness there is bad enough when compared to the hi-end bright and clean Orlando/Newark terminals, but I had never before encountered in the UK a 100m plus queue to get to passport control. What a mess.

Anyway, thanks to loyal readers (and welcome to visitors from Instapundit and Austin Bay) for making August a bumper month even though for the past few days I have given blogoiring a rest.

Or maybe people like it when I don't say anything. Hmm.

One way or the other, a million hits on the site so far this year, and even if many of them are e-spiders scurrying round the Internet to sell Viagra that is still a plumply satisfactory number.

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

Busy ploughing through Lonely Hearts by John Harvey.

The hero of this series of well praised detective stories is Detective Charlie Resnick. He has a Polish background which makes a lugubrious appearance now and again.

But if Arrow Books are going to do detective stories with a Polish angle, they ought to get Poles to help the proof-reading.

Imagine my shock and dismay to see on p 249 of the 2002 edition (corrected now?) the Polish national dish traduced by being turned into something with an Albanian flavour: they meant pierogi, but it appeared as pieroqi.

Resnick visits a Polish woman settled in the UK. There on the wall (p 251) is a picture of Cardinal Wysznski. Who or what is he? Can't they spell? They must be referring to Cardinal Wyszynski.

Come on, Arrow Books. These are all easy words.

Try Polish for beetle: chrzaszcz.

Then move on the infamous Polish tongue-twister:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie
I Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.

Which Wikipedia kindly helps one pronounce: 

[fʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨ.ɲε xʂɔɰ̃ʂʧ bʐmi ftʂtɕi.ɲε]
[i.ʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨn stε.gɔ swɨ.ɲε]

And means:

In the town of Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed
And Szczebrzeszyn is famous for it.

As it should be.

Remember the heroic fight for freedom by Ezra Levant in Canada over his publication of the dreaded Danish cartoons of Mohamed?

He has won!

Sort of.

He didn’t say I was free. He said I merely met his censorship standards, so I may go. Those are two completely different things.

Indeed.

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means keeping secrets secret, the public respecting limits on the public's 'right to know'. Lost lap-tops containing secret official material convey a sense of fathomless incompetence.

In return for ceding extra government discretion in this murky area, the public react badly to politicians whipping up public sentiment on the basis of inconclusive intelligence analysis, as happened in the run-up to the Iraq intervention. 

You know when you are seeing something Really Secret when its heading is a Greek letter or acronym you haven't seen before: TOP SECRET UK EYES A EPSILON/LOCKTIGHT or somesuch.

During my career I have seen all sorts of highly confidential analyses of controversial issues and countless Top Secret reports. I have written such papers myself.

Now I have left the FCO. Should I be free to use my privileged access to this fruity material to make money or stir up public anger, even if I happen to think the moral case is just?

In my view, no. Certainly not immediately I leave the Service, and for some purposes never.

The 'system' (and here I part company with Craig Murray) does offer all sorts of democratic best practice ways for officials to register substantive concerns, compatible with maintaining the secret methods needed to track foreign spies working against us, or managing threats posed by ruthless terrorist killers themselves armed with high-tech kit.

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

Risky business for politicians and the public alike, one way or the other? Yes.

All that noted, if we agree that I am not to be 'allowed' to use my knowledge of highly sensitive processes/facts as I like immediately on leaving the FCO, how to give effect to that?

And if there are Rules or Principles, how to apply them? What threat should hang over me to deter me, a former British diplomat pecking away at my lonely keyboard, from overstepping the rules, in letter or spirit?

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

Threats to my pension? Ah now you're talking!

Finally, who in the end decides if a line has been overstepped, and what should happen next?

The Public Affairs Committee made a strong point in noting that in Freedom of Information Act disputes a separate outside mechanism has been set up to stop a Ministry being judge and jury where its own information is concerned. Something like that could be used to settle in a gentlemanly way rows over contested memoirs of the Jeremy Greenstock sort?

Ministers! The smart way to lean is towards generosity, creativity and flexibility. Do not appear vindictive/obsessive/defensive.

Few if any 'revelations' by former civil servants do drastic irreparable damage. We are in fact quite loyal for most purposes, most of the time.

Much worse political damage can be done by appearing to cover up and duck the hard questions than by taking some hits, heavy and unfair as they may be at the time.

And, above all Ministers, behave in an honourable, trustworthy and fair-minded way towards your officials and the public alike.

This gives you your best chance of winning their respect and so surviving the inevitable squalls of democratic public life in good shape, maybe even with a reputation enhanced.

Light touch, old boy, light touch – always the safest policy.

The House of Commons Public Affairs Select Committee has now given its thoughts on the FCO/Cabinet Office rules - tightened after the Craig Murray and Sir Christopher Meyer books - on what diplomats can (or not) say after they leave the Service.

Their view:

 ... the results do indeed appear to be excessively wide-ranging and oppressive. Their only saving grace is that they seem to be unworkable.

A bit of a tonking?

I have dashed off some thoughts for the Independent's Open House pages. Here.

More to follow.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.

Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.

Was he writing the script for The Dark Knight?

Is B Obama losing momentum?

If so, is it because he did not take some earlier advice?

Buying things is a redistribution of wealth.

Wood?

Meet Axe.

The role (if any) played by former diplomats in public life depends to quite a degree on how - and how far - they draw on their extensive and unique experiences in the Diplomatic Service.

So, questions.

What are the limits if any on what they can say publicly about information/insights and sheer gossip gained from working for the taxpayer?

And who decides?

Following the noise generated by the memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer the Government looked again at the rules. And aimed to tighten them up.

My former colleague Sir Edward Clay has come out especially strongly against this move:

It remains to be seen whether future retirees will flout the FCO's legally dubious gag; the FCO clearly intends to hear progressively less from its retired and senior members, unless it approves of what is uttered. It suppresses valedictory despatches from retiring ambassadors, afraid of criticisms. There have been whispers of an attempt to get mandarins to sign over copyright on anything they write - novels and poetry, as well as despatches.

The FCO tells retirees that the rules applying to their serving colleagues also apply to them, for ever. Books, articles and lectures have got to be cleared months ahead. But the real rub comes with the requirement to give five days' notice of what they intend to say in any appearances on, or articles in, the media: any public comment based upon any of their professional experience is covered, far broader than previous strictures on official secrets or confidentiality. Unspecified civil or criminal proceedings are threatened for transgressors.

Sir Edward's and other vigorous interventions have prompted Parliament to take a look. The HoC Public Administration Select Committee is expected to pronounce today. A trailer.

In case you are wondering, before I left the FCO I told them that I was planning to write this Blog. I would use my judgement as to what I did or did not publish. I did not plan to seek publicity for myself via self-indulgent gossip or hot policy 'embarrassing revelations', mainly as I had none to reveal.

Rather I planned to talk about the diplomatic and political world in a quizzical, sometimes sharp way, to cast light on processes in public life and the professional dilemmas that arise.

Sounds good to us, they said.

Not a peep from them since.

Basically, the argument from some former Ambassadors is that they can not trust the Government to enforce these rules fairly.

Is not the problem that the Government these days can not trust senior civil servants to respect them?

Whence this decline in mutual trust?

A fish rots from the top.

Welcome, Britblog Roundup readers.

The latest Roundup is here. It links to one of my Craig Murray Saga posts: "long-term mud-wrestle ... one to watch."

Lots of other interesting blogs there too.

Such as the Stroppybird - someone about as far from my own views as I can imagine. It does one good to step outside one's own little world now and then.

An interesting pair of Ambassadorial letters to newspapers have appeared in recent days.

First, HM Ambassador in Poland Ric Todd wrote in July to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita about the death in a plane accident in 1943 in Gibraltar of General Sikorski.

Various Poles continue to insist that this death was suspicious, with one latest theory being that the conniving British persuaded some Poles to effect sabotage. Huge efforts have been made down the years to investigate this tragedy, but the fact that nothing suspicious is ever found makes those who have suspicions even more suspicious.

Ambassador Todd aims once again to put the record straight:

The facts are sad but simple. Plane travel was more dangerous then than it is now. People who travelled by air during the war took risks. General Sikorski was a brave man who took those risks to see his troops and died in a plane crash. The British Government has already released all documents in its archives relating to the circumstances of General Sikorski's death, including the report of the 1943 Royal Air Force Commission of Inquiry and 1969 Report of the investigation into the accident, carried out by the then Co-ordinator of Intelligence, Sir Dick White. 

 Nothing has been found in the Secret Intelligence files to link Kim Philby or anyone else with General Sikorski's death. There is nothing to indicate that his death was not accidental. All the documents are in the public domain and are accessible to all researchers in the National Archives in London. Following their declassification these documents have continually been open to the public.  Nothing is being withheld.

Separately the Polish Ambassador in London Barbara Tuge-Erecinska has written to the Times about an article about Poles in the UK by Giles Coren, which in his usual bruising style takes up the theme of Polish anti-semitism:

... I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.

That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore.

My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.

The Polish Ambassador replies:

... The issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified in his emotional text. During the Second World War Poland was the target of the Nazi Germany’s aggression, and the Poles themselves were treated as the race of sub-humans. Any sort of assistance given to Jews was punished by death. Such assistance required heroism, as it was not only one’s own life that was put at stake, but also the lives of one’s family. Still, it is the Poles that make up the most of those awarded Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.

I will not make detailed references to the remaining aggressive remarks on Poland, unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge. What I find most important is that the general public, as result of similar publications, should not lose an understanding of what the Holocaust was and who the perpetrators were.

In short, Nazi Germany decided to wipe out the whole nation. This was unprecedented in human history. Poland’s role in the tragedy of the Holocaust consists in the fact that the extermination of the Jewish people happened to take place on Polish territory. The author seems to have forgotten that Poles were not responsible for devising and perpetrating this hideous crime...

In each case sensible and dignified letters, giving the readers of the two newspapers concerned (and thereby in effect putting on the public record) a clear official view but with a personal touch.

The general professional issue for Ambassadors is this.

On any given day in the country where one is posted there will be all sorts of annoying, tendentious and even untrue/stupid things being said about one's own country. A few of them bubble up to a wide readership or otherwise gain some public prominence.

Even if there is no reason to think that these views are held or in any way supported by one's host government, the very fact that they circulate potentially affects the 'climate of opinion' in the bilateral relationship.

So, when to write something in response? And what to write?

No good answer.

Not writing has a cost. It may allow erroneous or malign opinions about one's own country to circulate indefinitely, perhaps in ever more lurid fashion.

But writing a letter for publication also has a cost. It somehow dignifies and gives weight to the views being expressed, maybe thereby drawing even more attention to them. And it invites all sorts of further weary sniping from people who have an axe to grind or who just want to poke back at Ambassadors.

The Polish Foreign Ministry has something of a policy to respond firmly every time anything appears in the foreign media implying that the Holocaust was a Polish invention (phrases like 'Polish death camps' prompt a fierce and often successful response).

The British FCO leaves it to an Ambassador's discretion when and how and if at all to respond to annoying local views on official British positions.

I wrote to various Bosnian/Serbian/Polish newspapers on different occasions. I suspect my letters made not a scrap of difference one way or the other.

In especially scandalous or ridiculous cases where material consistently wrong had been published by ostensibly serious papers to the point of suggesting a dishonest campaign against British positions, I went to meet the Editor to offer an official view as and when one was needed.

I used the line that of course they could write what they liked when it came to comment/interpretation, but could we at least try to agree to get the facts (eg of what a British Minister or I myself had actually said) accurate?

That worked in a sporadic way. But often the newspapers concerned just did not care.

All in all, writing an Ambassadorial letter to a newspaper is best done sparingly. But even if you know that it is unlikely to change many minds, you feel better after sending it.

Which is part of the story too.

Craig Murray responds to my previous post:

Charles,

You brush very lightly over the fact that you praised in the warmest terms at the time the telegrams you now rubbish - as did numerous other Ambassadors including Jeremy Greenstock who commended the to his New York morning meeting.  I think that your new-found Damascean conversion to rubbihing me on behalf of the Establishment needs a little fuller explanation for your readers.

I think the most important single point here is one of honesty.  Our policy was based on accepting as true an official narrative of both economic and political reform which was simply impossible to square with the objective facts on the ground.  That theme recurred again and again throughout the book.  I don't think intellectual dishonesty is ever the basis for good policy.

I can respect though not agree with an argument from realpolitik that says "Karimov is very bad but we need him" as you posit.  But that wasn't the argument, as you well know.  The line being peddled by the US and supported in Whitehall was "Karimov's really not that bad a guy - look at all these reforms".  It was the intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of it that I found so frustrating.

I did not mean to brush over my email of congratulations to Craig on one of his early E-grams, nor do I think I did so. Plus see also this from an earlier post in April:

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where 'the West' had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Nor am I 'rubbishing' him or his telegrams now.

Craig has made a lively new life after leaving the FCO trading heavily on his former Ambassadorial status and access to sensitive information and insights he acquired while on the public payroll.  Hence, and with the benefit of some hindsight now, fair questions.

What sort of example did/does Craig Murray set? What lessons does his complex case teach young diplomats starting their careers?

As an informed FCO insider, now ex-FCO outsider I have been analysing his own published account of his work as HMA Uzbekistan, looking methodically at the important policy and procedural issues it raised. This is as far as I know the first time this has been done in such detail.

I think - and I think I have been showing - that Craig's work in a senior civil service position overseas gives us a fertile if not unique combination of poor technique and judgement attached to high-octane personal commitment. With British public and political life in its current demoralised state, such an example is well worth a close look.

Craig's claim that I am have had a 'new-found Damascean conversion' to rubbishing him 'on behalf of the Establishment' is a good example of the Murray Law of the Excluded Middle:

• Crawford rubbishes me
• The Establishment rubbishes me
• Therefore Crawford is rubbishing me on behalf of the Establishment

Puny illogic, which as shall be demonstrated infects important parts of Craig's professional work and helps cause his downfall (or meteoric rise to glory/notoriety, depending on what one wants to call it).

And whereas I can be blamed for many things in my FCO career, being part of the Establishment is (as Craig knows) just not one of them.

Anyway, I'll be moving on to the substance of Craig's other points above as my analysis of the book unfolds.

If anyone is impatient for More in the meantime, have a look at another what Brian Barder - yet another former British Ambassador - had to say on all this back in 2006. Plenty of thoughtful points here and in the links.

There's still time to do so, either here or via Iain Dale's site.

But you do need to vote for 10 UK blogs, so get cracking. Plenty to choose from on the TP Blog Directory.

Guide to Political Blogs 2008-9: Vote for your Top Ten Blogs

This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that:

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected to follow.

The recommendation is one of several that the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee is expected to make in its long-awaited report on harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The Report itself is here. Its overwhelming focus is "the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation."

I have gone through the document. There is only one single reference to blogs/blogging:

This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously.

It's all about:

the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film ...  a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

I try not to think about such things. But note the writing: four weary adverbs already, bulging the text like cotton wool stuffed in to expand an unstrained M&S bra.

What about this:

A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

Ha.Grown-up women are all about pretending to be grown-up! I knew it.

But they're for sure brainy:

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk” ... What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Doesn't vampy black nail varnish avoid an unseemly and impious clash?

You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with.

Women together, and vacuous articles in the Times about women together. A load of nothing?

Iain Dale urges his vast army of fans to read Total Politics Issue 2 - and one article in particular.

Indeed.

One version is here.

Some speeches are good for what they say. Others for how they make people feel.

This speech said more or less nothing, but reads nicely now and no doubt sounded good on the day. Or maybe not?

This paragraph caught my eye:

This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century - in this city of all cities - we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

Hmm: every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday.

Feeble drafting. But what might it mean?

Some sort of dig at Russia, telling it to stop messing in the former Soviet Union? A plug for Chechnya?

A clarion-call to those who want to leave the EU, so that those who stay in it can forge a stronger/closer Union?

Support for the break-up of the UK (or Belgium, or Spain, or Bosnia)?

Even Bland Nothing sends a signal of sorts.

My new Total Politics piece is out, full of Helpful Tips about how a new Minister should start to run a government Department.

It's quick to register and you can then see it on the E-zine.

More in the pipeline for issues 3 and 4.

Nigel Short has a lively use of words, as well as a lively chess style.

See the detailed rulings on his use of the word 'dunderheads' to describe two senior chess officials.

Defamatory or 'mere vulgar abuse'?

Who said that chess is boring?

Crawford v Murray (if that is what it is) has reached the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary (alas not available on their website):

Mandarin puts knife into FO’s loose cannon

UNCIVIL war has broken out at the Foreign Office. Charles Crawford, the retired former ambassador to Warsaw, has broken ranks to express publicly for the first time what the FO really thinks of its errant ex-ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and his memoirs, Murder In Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of the War on Terror.

Most significantly Crawford, whose acerbic memos had a cult following in the FCO, contests the theory that Mur­ray’s career was a “brilliant” one, des­tined for great things before being derailed by his removal from the post for accusing the government in Tashkent of human rights abuses...

... A contemporary of Tony Blair’s at St John’s Oxford, Crawford is no stranger to stirring up a hornet’s nest — in 2005 one of his “blackly humorous” personal emails was leaked to The Sunday Times, revealing how much he hated EU budget negotiations and suggesting they would be better conducted by Mr Blair placing a large alarm clock on the table with a deal to be done by the time the bell rung.

While many in the FCO privately agree that Murray has “gone native” and lacks judgment they will be sur­prised by the vehemence of Crawford’s remarks. He is the most senior manda­rin so far to speak out so strongly against a former colleague who was highlighting human rights abuses ...

Droll headline. 

Just to point out that as neither CC nor CM are actually employed by the FCO any longer, it is a bit odd to say that "an uncivil war has broken out at the Foreign Office".

Nor have I in any way purported to proclaim that what I write is "what the FO really thinks" about Craig Murray and his story.

Insofar as the FO really thinks about this matter, I imagine views are mixed.

Some people may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror and liked his defiant stand, even if it ended in a mess.

Others may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror but thought his way of selling it was in purely professional terms unwise/bad and/or counter-productive.

Others may have disapproved of Craig's War on Terror views and thought his way of selling them was bad.

Others may not have cared one way or the other on the policy level, but been happy or unhappy about the way the business was handled in personnel terms.

The Ministers involved at the time maybe viewed the whole business differently from their officials.

And so on.

What I plan to do is to carry on looking at the book in detail on my website, since it gives a probably uniquely rich seam of 'raw honesty' illuminated by vivid examples of policy and operational dilemmas for the British diplomats involved, at home and at Post alike.

Thus the book raises convincingly many serious questions for practitioners and the public. It deserves what it has not had so far (I think), namely a critical practitioner's analysis of it.

So, on we go tomorrow.

I was a great fan of the Balkan 'yellow press' in all its exotic glory.

Presumably these strange papers and magazines have a non-trivial readership otherwise they would not be published in such profusion. So as Ambassador wanting to develop insight into the thinkings of society as a whole, I felt it well worth swinging through them now and again.

My favourite was Twilight Zone (Zona Sumraka). It looks to have become a bit more suburban of late, being reincarnated as Magic Zone. In Belgrade a few years ago it broke an amazing number of world scoops, which alas the planet heeded not.

Remember the terrifying Calcutta Monkey-Man? 

Twilight Zone discovered that NATO special forces had secretly kidnapped this evil creature and used latest DNA technology to clone it, before bringing it to Kosovo. But it had escaped and was feasting on Albanians! 

Not to forget the genetically mutated beetles created by NATO bombings of Serbia, poised to start breeding in your garden.

Or Tutankhamun's mysterious Ring of Power which caused havoc in the wrong hands. It had been discovered by a malign German scientist and brought to New York, prompting the 9/11 disaster, and after various detours causing earthquakes/plagues/floods was heading for ... Mitrovica!

Unambiguously excellent.

There is also a political yellow press, which hopes society stays cynical and stupid. These publications take a tit-bit of gossip from the editor's cousin working in the police and explode it out of all proportion: All politicians are corrupt! All diplomats are spies! Albanians are dangerous!

Yet these papers too are not without interest, and operate on many levels.

A current sophisticated example is Kurir - see this world scoop of a former Kostunica adviser meeting a former US Ambassador. Sinister indeed.

A further recent scoop is how the British and US intelligence services conspired together to plan to assassinate Serbian PM Kostunica in Sarajevo back in 2002. The evidence is the purported transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation in a Belgrade restaurant between two UK and US diplomats.

Come on, Kurir.

You know that when the waiters in these places change the dirty salt and pepper pots for clean ones, we diplomats always speak louder and more clearly into the new microphones and make up silly stories.

Kurir of course do know this, so they slip in some clever little signals to show the real experts that the whole thing is a spoof, like deliberately confusing 'Anthony' for 'Andrew' within the same sentence. Elegantly done.

OK, let's start reviewing Craig Murray's book Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (Mainstream Publishing, 2007 edition)

Where better than the covers?

Harold Pinter "salutes a man of integrity"

John Sweeney: "An amazing narrative, beautifully written..."

John Pilger: "A man of the highest principle"

Here is the Sweeney review. It gets off to a fine start, describing said John Pilger as a "moral pimple". Sweeney on Murray:

Brilliant, unorthodox, committed to championing the causes of the United Kingdom, free trade and human rights, Murray had served his country with aplomb in Poland, Ghana and in the Citadel in Whitehall.

Oddly he does not mention Craig Murray's now largely forgotten aplombless role in the Sandline Affair. The official House of Commons Report is not altogether flattering here, describing Murray's note of a crucial meeting as "grossly inadequate".

UPDATE:  Craig has pointed out to me that he did not write that note but rather approved the draft submitted by his colleague. True, but Craig had been the lead FCO personality at what turned out to have been a crucial meeting in the whole Sandline affair (see here Tim Spicer's version of that encounter), so in my opinion it was up to him to take the rap (if any) for the way it was recorded.

Sweeney presses on:

But the rising star sizzled up like an overdone sausage when he came up against the War on Terror. The fascination of Craig Murray's tale of his fall from grace at the hands of the Foreign Office is that he gives so much ammunition to his enemies ... it is the honesty with which Murray reports his predicament that is striking. I do not think that he holds anything back from the reader, and that makes his indictment of the Foreign Office mandarins and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw all the more compelling. He is an honest man, and that seems to have been his difficulty.

Well put.

Part of me has never been able to understand Appeasement, how the British Establishment could have bent so low. Having read Murray's story, I can now. Even so, it is a shocking read, to see how often the Foreign Office twisted facts and invented half-truths to do Murray down. Fascinatingly, no one outside bought a word of it.

Sweeney buys 100% of Murray's version. He concludes:

Some of the most fascinating bits of this book concern how Murray, the insider, used Foreign Office procedure against the FO itself.

But, in the end, he was forced out, and what Murray claims were the big lies - for example, that the British government opposes torture in intelligence-gathering - were able to settle down, no longer challenged from within ... But truth will out. Craig Murray is at pains - sometimes absurdly so - to demonstrate that he is no hero. But that doesn't stop him from being heroic, or his book from being a bloody good read.

Sweeney takes a view on the merits relying primarily on Craig's book. Fine - up to him.

What I object to is his bold claim that this book is "beautifully written".

Craig's writing fills to the brim the Bucket of Cliche at the Well of Lubricity, and quaffs deep.

Take Craig's own description of the recruitment of Kristina as his new locally engaged secretary, a key job:

The moment the first candidate walked through the door, she had the job. She had the most extraordinary classical beauty, a perfect face framed by long blonde hair ... Karen agreed she was the best candidate, which I found a very useful defence when Fiona first set eyes on Kristina.

(Professional Judgement Rating:  0/10. Sexist/patronising: the language used here calls into question the claim that the best available candidate was picked. Even a hint of this sort of thing in eg an appraisal on a colleague could trigger disciplinary action.)

Later Craig hosts a small but select - and important - dinner party for Simon Butt, a senior colleague from London sent to Tashkent to try to ascertain what is going on in both Uzbekistan and the Embassy. A mess ensues when several key business contacts do not show on the night.

Craig's wife Fiona afterwards lays it on the line: "It's that bloody Kristina. She's useless."

Craig next day confronts Kristina.

And here, reader, steel yourself.

What follows is without any doubt the very worst passage ever written in any language by someone with diplomatic training:

 ... Kristina standing by the back of the car in a thick white jumper with a large roll-up neck that framed her face. I was struck anew by just how exquisite her beauty was, how classical. As she said 'Good morning', a little cloud of vapour sprang from her mouth and hung in the cold air. I thought how pleasant it would be to thrust forward my face and be enveloped in the little warm mist of that pretty exhalation.

Sadly, there was no escaping the need to discuss the previous night's dinner