Not long before I left Belgrade in 2003 I had a good discussion with the then Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister, Goran Svilanovic. An astute operator. He said that one of the problems in dealing with the EU is that "you don’t do deals. The Americans love deals, but you […]
I return to Poland this week, my first visit back since driving across the border into Germany at the end of September last year. To help prevent Ambassadors from setting themselves up plumply in the country of their final posting, the UK Civil Service has a rule to the effect that former […]
The Telegraph reports that there is a scary new plan being hatched in Brussels – for the EU to have Embassies. Well? First, the EU already has a goodly selection of Delegations and Offices round the world. They are there to carry out work in policy areas where the EU […]
A new consensus is emerging. Biofuels are Bad. Not that long ago they were Good. As Mark Steyn puts it: On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government […]
Back in 2001 when I had been Ambassador in Belgrade for only a few weeks not long after the fall of Milosevic, I was asked to give oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. Here it is. It reads pretty well now as a summary of […]
EU Referendum’s thoughts on why a ‘European Foreign Policy’ is not a good idea got me thinking. What actually is ‘Foreign Policy’ anyway? Could the EU in fact be good at some aspects of it but not all? What are the pros and cons for the UK of ‘More Europe’ in the […]
Being a speech-writer for a leading politician is not an easy job. I did it for two years, as the FCO official speech-writer for then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe. Sir Geoffrey set a high standard. He insisted on his texts offering the maximum amount of meaning and unrelenting logic […]
Returning to the history of those 2005 EU Budget negotiations. It was clear from the outset to anyone in the know (a) that there would be an increased EU budget, and (b) that those who Give and not those who Get would determine just how much bigger. Since […]
Reader Robbie has sent in a pertinent comment on my post about Objectives, Targets: Not sure I agree with you on the wider point about targets … Given the size and complexity of modern public service delivery, no Minister can reasonably be expected to have a strong sense of what […]
But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy […]
