Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine.

It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks:

When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see how my long-lost august predecessors had analysed Polish affairs. A despatch was a special British diplomatic form: not an urgent report on a new development, but an extended learned essay on a particular theme thought likely to be of interest to the FCO community. These despatches would reach the FCO via the Bag, and unless they were totally hopeless would be sent off for printing on green paper for circulating to all embassies and senior Whitehall offices.

This great tradition suffered a painful death as e-communications came in. It lingered on in the form of the valedictory despatch, a round-up essay sent by an Ambassador leaving a post or ending a career which (after I set the precedent in 1998 when I left Sarajevo) was sent electronically and not by the Bag. This was suppressed in 2006: too many valedictories contained tedious moaning about modern diplomatic life and/or political correctness which tended to get leaked, making the FCO look like a care-home for pompous male fossils…

Anyway, those Warsaw Embassy despatches from 50 years ago were cast in a style which has vanished without trace. The language was grand and unfailingly ‘heavy’ as the authors pored over absurd proclamations by Poland’s communist leaders and tried to make sense of unfeasibly large output statistics for coal or soap.

Worst, the Polish regime was analysed as if it were a legitimate normal government. Lofty detachment was not supported by lofty disdain. There was no hard questioning of the regime’s oppressive behaviour, or suggestions as to how we might help Poland get back to democracy.

For me the very pinnacle of diplomatic drafting came in the early 1990s when Sir David (now Lord) Hannay as HM Ambassador to the UN presided over a mighty torrent of two-side telegrams from New York. This work combined terse analysis of complex diplomatic negotiations on the world’s toughest problems with magisterial advice on how to make the next moves. The technical quality, intellectual breadth and operational wisdom – the sheer authority – of this bloc of work have probably never been achieved in any other foreign service; the FCO itself now struggles to get to anything like the same standard…

As for Wikileaks, the day the absurd Assange loses his latest legal battle is a good day to celebrate the true significance of those miles of US diplomatic cables dumped on the Internet:

What should we make of the fact that this unfathomably vast bloc of contemporary American diplomatic traffic has been leaked? The infamous observation of Stalin comes to mind: ‘When one man dies it is a tragedy; when thousands die, it’s statistics.’

Where to start? In 2005, I had my own ghastly leaked email moment which made some fleeting headlines round the globe (see Diplomat, November 2009). But the Wikileaks document dump exists in a category of its own.

The material is so powerful precisely because it blows away Assange’s banal anti-Americanism. Yes, it’s horribly embarrassing for Washington that all these cables have leaked. Confidences have been ruined. Sources endangered. In terms of writing style the cables often err on the dense and overlong side.

However, far from exposing the dark side of American/Western policies they show as never before the strengths and values of the Western Anglosphere diplomatic method. The documents uncover mile after mile of sensible, balanced, practical, timely and reasonable analysis and comment by American diplomats, often with amusing extra insights and personal touches…

Read the whole thing. And all the other articles too. This one is good – back from nearly 18 months ago. Looks at issues of ‘sovereignty’ and even mentions the Eurozone crisis:

States have sovereignty not just over their own land, but also the resources found below it and the air above it. Most people never think about the legal aspects of flying from one country to another – the misery of security checks, plastic food and volcanic ash are enough. Yet someone flying from London to Singapore travels over a number of countries in between, all of which have formally given their consent. If that consent is withdrawn, the aircraft must find another route – sovereignty in action.

But surely ‘sovereignty’ is much less important these days? Have not European Union Member States ‘surrendered sovereignty’ to a ‘higher’ authority, namely the Union itself?

EU-level institutions are unique in world history. They create legal norms binding on all the Union’s Member States, even in the face of opposition from some Member States. Thus if the UK opposes a new EU Directive purporting to reform banks and funds, it can be outvoted by other Member States which want the change. And, once outvoted, it is expected to enforce the new requirements in a dutiful way.

This arguably is not a reduction in UK sovereignty, but rather an expression of UK sovereignty. The UK has of its own free will (at least as expressed through Parliament when ratifying the Lisbon Treaty) accepted EU voting rules which allow this to happen, just as the Treaty also provides a procedure to enable a Member State to leave the Union and get back all its sovereignty once again.

Nonetheless, as the eurozone crisis gathers momentum, the existential question of sovereignty is coming back to the fore even in placid, postmodern Europe. What claims, if any, do (say) Greeks have on (say) German resources and hard work by virtue of EU ‘solidarity’? What claims do eurozone members have on (say) the UK, smugly watching the disarray from across the Channel? Tricky.

Very tricky.