Over at @TelegraphBlogs my new piece on the government’s footling refusal to share a full breakdown of civil servants’ travel expenses: The Coalition will soon be publishing travel expenses for Ministers and senior civil servants, a good step forward. I can just about grudgingly accept that it makes sense not […]
Another day, another attempt to broker a deal betwen Israel and the Palestine Authority, this time with John Kerry leading the charge. Who knows, maybe this one will get somewhere. Perhaps the generalised shambles in Egypt and across the Middle East will create a sense that if there has to […]
A busy day, with Sky TV coming round to the house to interview me about the draft speech by The Queen on the eve of 1980s nuclear war, except that it wasn’t. Here is piece I have written for the Telegraph on the clueless draft speech supposedly by HM The […]
What to make of the Bradley Manning verdict – guilty on multiple counts? My first reaction is “good!”. Here is a silly if not mentally ill squirt who abused a position of trust and leaked vast quantities of American classified material, most of it things he could not even have […]
Here is another article fretting feebly over the fact that the European Union is ‘punching below its weight’ in global negotiations: Although the EU is a minority bloc within the General Assembly and Human Rights Council (HRC), its power resources could in principle be wielded to help the EU gain […]
Round at the FCO yesterday I had a chat with some people who know what they are talking about on the increasingly strange case of Julian Assange and the Ecuador Embassy. It turns out that the costs of keeping a close eye on him continue to rise, although of course […]
My latest piece for PunditWire looks at some of the feeble messages emanating from President Obama’s much heralded Cairo speech in 2009 and wonders if they missed the point. It notes that the vast crowds in Cairo demonstrating against the Muslim Brotherhood have been identifying the current US Ambassador by […]
Every now and again an article comes along that assembles all one’s own inchoate half-thoughts into a free-flowing stupendous whole. This time Charles Moore delivers on the plight of wretched US über-leaker Edward Snowden: Acting in the name of a morality which disdains allegiance to the rule of national law, […]
You’re wondering what I have been up to in May. I have been rushing around like a whirling dervish. Thus: • a presentation on Difficult Conversations to the senior management of a distinguished school • a talk at my old school on Lessons for Life • fielding a group of […]
UPDATE This piece below (“Short, pithy, packed with more wisdom than you find in bloviations ten times the length”) has been picked up by the Browser Here is my latest piece over at Commentator, looking at the startlingly poor performance by a clueless State Department spokeswoman when asked to […]
