This week marks the 10th anniversary of the murder of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Here is the piece I wrote on the 8th anniversary. It mentions the proliferation of insane Serbian conspiracy theories somehow hinting that I was linked to the assassination and/or lobbied for the then Deputy Prime […]
Here’s my Telegraph Blogs piece this morning on the news coming from Brussels that mirabile dictu the EU Budget may in fact not grow over the coming seven year financial cycle: The French have made the usual belligerent noises, feigning to champion increased spending that they too can’t afford. As […]
Over at Backbencher Lee Jenkins takes a look at some issues surrounding ‘international intervention’ from a libertarian-inclining standpoint: Yet international relations is a sphere refreshingly free of ideology. States are motivated less by values and ideals, and more by a narrow set of objectives and interests… Once you acknowledge what motivates a country’s […]
Rummaging around in some of my former work, I had another look at this piece I wrote back in November about the decline and fall of Denis MacShane: Warsaw was at least more or less normal. When I had arrived as ambassador in Bosnia in 1996 not long after the […]
My piece for The Commentator on the PM’s UK/EU speech as a speech: … Those sentences, like the opening blather about the origins of the European Union, are intended to send a strong signal to other European capitals: You won’t get a better UK Conservative leader than me who has […]
Here is an elegant bit of work by Jonathan Golub (golub means pigeon in Serbian, by the way) attempting to measure which EU member states are better at getting their way within the system. I could add all sorts of glosses, but read the whole thing and see for yourself […]
Here’s one to ponder. Purely hypothetical of course. Say you are an ex-diplomat turmned consultant of no little erstwhile seniority, and you are asked to help with a significant business problem involving a foreign government and a private corporation. You are happy in principle to help the corporation move the […]
My latest piece over at Telegraph Blogs looks at how far if at all we can fathom out whether any given EU Budget outcome represents a ‘cut’, and if so a cut of precisely what: The key thing to look for this time is (a) the baseline used for any […]
Decision time (or not) for the EU Budget for the period 2014-2020. I have written extensively on this subject. Here is my classic analysis (in two parts) from 2010 at Conservative Home on the whole process. Read it to get up to speed. More recently I was opining at Telegraph […]
For no obvious reason the Browser is recycling a strange 2010 interview with Lord Alerdice, who played a significant part in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The subject is about terrorism, causes of: For me it isn’t a moral term. In other words, I am not using terrorism to […]
