Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone. If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced! Not that it is perfect. Too many rather […]
This appears to be a well-sourced Telegraph piece revealing that the FCO has instructed Embassies to start making contingency plans for a Eurozone crash. If so, it’s startling. Startling! Partly because our much-diminished Embassies across the EU – cheerily cut back by Labour and this Coalition government alike to redeploy diplomats […]
The first meeting of the Foreign Secretary’s new Locarno Group ("senior FCO alumni, selected for their breadth of experience and expertise") took place today. The aim, part of an energetic and even impressive series of moves led by William Hague to transform the FCO’s performance at many new levels, is not […]
Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo’s independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic). Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon: The main interest of the book for […]
Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008? I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing […]
Last week I attended the annual FCO remembrance ceremony held in November each year to honour FCO diplomats and colleagues who have been killed while on duty. I try to attend each year, as my friend and colleague Charles Morpeth was killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia in 1997 […]
Readers here know all about MTS and non-MTS. It seemed a good idea to explain the idea to Telegraph Blog readers. Done here, with a nice stormy seas picture: Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured? One of the metaphors I deployed to explain Bosnia’s […]
We mere taxpayers suspect in our dark hearts that a formidable industry has grown up around the ‘climate change’ issue, with all sorts of organisations big and small depending on state handouts to survive, and so frothing up the climate issue regardless of the facts to make sure that those handouts […]
Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine. It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks: When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see […]
As readers here know, the Spiegel Online site is a fine way to find thoughtful pieces on the goings-on in Europe from a German perspective. Try these two for size. The first is an interview with Polish Central Bank Governor Marek Belka (who served for a while as a technocrat Prime Minister […]
