A kind reader fairly deep in the former Soviet Union writes:

Would be good to discuss your blog sometime.  Interesting balance between being outraged/outrageous enough to stand out from the crowd and get people to read, and being sensible enough to matter

Ha ha. Story of my life. It’s just that the FCO mandarins did not much like the outraged/outrageous part of the deal. they wanted respect for process:

Anyway, Sir John hauled me in to give me a pep talk. His basic point was simple. "Listen, young Crawford. You did well with all that flashy stuff playing on the wing as Ambassador in Sarajevo. Now we have moved you to a key position in midfield, where we expect a different sort of game…"

I should have said (coolly) "I’ll play wherever you want me to play. It just depends how many goals you want."

Instead I merely curtsied prettily and shot off to try to bring down S Milosevic.

Successfully, as it happened. Yet my subsequent appraisal was oddly coy on the fact that Milosevic indeed had fallen; it was not altogether clear from that document that I had just helped Robin Cook deliver what he called his finest policy success as Foreign Secretary.

Instead the stuck needle remained stuck: "…comes across as shooting from the hip, and ideas deluge forth, some unfiltered … we could have done with a bit more respect for process". 

But was it not just a teensy-weensy bit possible that an excess of ‘process’ at the FCO and in other key capitals’ foreign ministries helped lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the Balkans in the 1990s?

In any case, as a veteran of some 28 years in the FCO I know things, not all of which have been made public. Top secret facts and processes. And really ripe examples of prominent people behaving badly.

Yet I also take confidentiality and professional respect seriously, which is why I declined to appear on Newsnight yesterday on the subject of Prince Andrew. I never hosted a visit by him, and it’s not for me to recycle gossip, thanks.

In other words, the way to boost blog readership (insofar as anything boosts it these days) is either to write genuinely newsworthy material, or simply rant about cats, Blair, Cameron, Muslims, football or indeed anything deemed rantworthy.

This site offers its elite group of wise and discerning readers a much more … subtle experience. 

Talking of elites, have a quick look at this piece by Nilofer Merchant who tackled the question of whether the TED phenomenon is ‘elitist’. And see how she chastised me in the comments for ‘dissing’ another commenter. Which prompted my reply:

What does matter (in my own opinion) is a sign of a nascent cultural tendency to attribute clear-thinking, open speaking and common sense to ‘bravery’.

This surely somehow or other suggests that the default state of affairs is expected to be a certain uneasy recoiling from controversy, or at least a willingness not to say too much which might be ‘awkward’ or inadvertently cause offence or ‘hurt someone’s feelings’.

And so it all goes on, round and round.