Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent:

There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova’s multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax – which owns Uzbekistan’s most valuable economic assets … Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov.

And we all recall what an appalling piece of work Gulnara is:

… charming and girlish … in a simple dress and laughing eyes … giggling at my light conversation…

The other day I bumped into a long-lost colleague from MI6. We exchanged some Balkan yarns.

He had done superb work for HMG and Western civilisation by taking a deep breath and diving deep into the darkest Balkan cesspools, where war crime suspects meet football club gangsters and cigarette smugglers in tawdry late-night casinos. To such an extent that his accurate intelligence information thereby gleaned was not trusted back at HQ – to HMG’s detriment.

The point about diplomacy is that in one way or the other we need to deal with the world as we find it, Gulnara and Karadzic and Karimov and North Korea and all.

Where I part company with Craig is that he boasted about his access to the higher parts of the Uzbekistan system but instead of using that access to make a systematic and significant difference, he turned all his fire and energy on his own team.

And got precisely nowhere in terms of changing Uzbekistan for the better.

Poor technique.