I am whirring away on my Speechwriting book. It takes me back to this effort that I prepared back in 1986 for the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. The opulent surroundings and fine nourishment of the annual Lord mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet were not an obvious choice for a speech on […]
Rummaging around in my website I found this magnificent Islamist forgery that has been doing the global rounds for many years: a letter supposedly from Prime Minister John Major to FCO Minister of State Douglas Hogg urging him to be horrid to the Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniacs). Here it is: […]
The bombastic smirking of Russia’s Victory Day parades is on a quite new scale this year. And why not? How often these days does a country get to boast to itself that it has grabbed part of some other country’s territory and seemingly got away with it? How did we […]
Here is my latest article for DIPLOMAT magazine – a review of David Owen’s fine new book on the diplomatic origins of the First World War. Thus: Readers of Diplomat will enjoy – and be startled by – many details Lord Owen gives us about diplomacy as practised a century […]
Things have slackened off again here, what with one thing and another. But here is the hefty piece I wrote about Ukraine last week for the Daily Telegraph. To be precise, I did not write it. I dictated it into my iPad from my hotel room in Gjakova (also known […]
A few days ago I posted this piece from Diplomatic Courier about the hopeless public speaking performance by the French and German Foreign Ministers in Sarajevo in 1997 (emphasis added): Where did the two countries’ diplomats organizing this event get things wrong? Basically, neither the Ministers’ respective offices nor their […]
I have opened a new writing flank with the fine US diplomatic publication Diplomatic Courier. Here is my first piece. It tells the tragic tale of the Franco-German speech disaster in Sarajevo in 1997, beginning as it mesans to continue: All happy speeches are alike. All unhappy speeches are different […]
I have written three pieces about South Africa, Nelson Mandela and all that. Two for the Commentator. The first here: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Fine, soaring sentiments. And quite untrue. Between 1985 and 1996 […]
My latest piece for Telegraph Blogs looks in (very) broad terms at Ukraine: In 1994 the EU Ambassadors had a meeting in Moscow at which they opined on the then reforms under President Yeltsin. The Belgian Ambassador grumbled that Russia was just too big, too communist and too “Asian” to […]
How to destroy Syria’s CW stocks, now that OPCW experts say that they have demolished Syria’s CW-making facilities? Not so easy to do this within Syria with a passing civil war raging on. So take the CW stocks to somewhere safe and do it nicely there. Hmm. But where? Albania […]
