Anne Pringle replaces Tony Brenton as HM Ambassador in Moscow, to official Russian smirking. This is, I think, the most senior diplomatic position in terms of batting weight ever achieved by a woman in HM Diplomatic Service. Yo. One of the problems as a senior diplomat posted overseas is how […]
Looking again at the twitterings of Mr Mahbubani, one comes away wondering why he is so patronising towards if not contemptuous of his fellow Asians. Let’s assume the world is complicated and that running any sort of government structure and pursuing numerous different policy objectives requires ever-higher levels of sophistication […]
The squall over Hillary Clinton’s skewed memory of her visit to Bosnia in 1996 recalls to my mind my own no doubt skewed memory of President Clinton’s set-piece speech in Sarajevo’s National Theatre during his subsequent visit with his wife in December 1997. During this visit much of that part of […]
Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
Every now and again one sees something which casts light on an unexpected area of human endeavour. Such as this one about Poles returning to Poland from the UK in a way which redefines the idea of ‘free movement of labour’ in the EU.
Some good advice via Guido from Dizzy on how civil servants can blog with reduced chance of detection. An interesting area. One of my first blog posts referred to a case of deliberate leaking by an FCO official which reached the courts where the case crashed. Does blogging = leaking? Not […]
Guido helpfully draws our attention to a briefing on Europe apparently prepared by a ‘Special Adviser’ in the FCO. But if this document is real it is SpAd work and in principle does not expose the poverty or otherwise of ‘FCO analysis’, as Guido’s headline reads. Let’s be accurate in such […]
On the subject of the leaked FCO SpAd document (if that is what it is), Guido makes the following point: "… a document produced by a civil servant, in office hours at the taxpayer’s expense should by rights not be the property of the Labour Party." A similar issue came […]
One of the many Stalinist Very Big Lies still echoing on down the ages is that there can be no attempted equivalence between Nazism and Communism, since Nazism (as Extreme Rightism) was an explicitly racist ideology whereas Communism (as part of general Leftism generally) utterly repudiated racism. This is not a dead […]
I have been invited to take part in a debate in London later this year to discuss the proposition that "Western Policy in the Balkans since 1991 has been a Disaster". As someone involved in formulating part of that policy I am down to argue against this proposition. What to […]
