Update: see in the Comments a terrific contribution from Michael S who gives excellent background * * * * * Craig is back with us, this time sniping at the British Ambassador in Tashkent, Rupert Joy. What has Rupert Joy done wrong this time? Shock! He’s attended a fashion event led by […]
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is in Moscow. Some thoughts. One of my earliest blog postings from back in 2008 described some of the issues arising from the Russian authorities’ beastly treatment of the British Council. It recorded something said to me by a senior Russian diplomat in 1996 […]
The worthy newspaper Blic in Belgrade asked me for a short commentary on my recollections of the Fall of Milosevic a decade ago. Here is the result. All in Serbian and with an eccentric picture of me by way of bonus. But Google Translator should help you get the gist. Of […]
Off I go to the International Bar Association annual conference, this year in lovely Vancouver. A vast gathering of lawyers. I am there with ADRg Ambassadors to help present a session on the different levels of mediation and negotiation skill needed when a racing yacht is grabbed by pirates. The point being […]
I have to say it. Frankly. I am disappointed in you, my readers. I deliberately do not clutter up this website with Internet advertising and other distracting marketing gimmicks. I wish to offer you a calm and agreeable intellectual experience. Nonetheless, in return I hope that you take seriously my […]
In case you don’t have quite enough to read, check out my gentle gallop round some of the issues arising from spying down the ages, over at the latest issue of DIPLOMAT: French spy, Francois Henri de la Motte’s vivid execution in 1781 attracted an enthusiastic crowd of some 80,000… […]
Daniel Hannan MEP berates the fact that UK contributions to the EU Budget are rising steeply at a time when all Government Departments in the UK are being forced to look for deep cuts. (Note: a terse video clip showing Mr Hannan orating in the European Parliament, a melodrama not improved by an […]
I was back stalking in the long corridors of the Foreign Office today, to give a talk on behalf of ADRg Ambassadors. I put in a word for Mediation as an example of the hard-edged soft power tool the UK now needed to be ffective at a time of growing global uncertainty […]
Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes. Here he was in October last year. And now again today: For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former. […]
The Independent today runs the story of deaf diplomat Jane Cordell’s claim that the FCO unlawfully discriminated against her in refusing to post her to Astana (Kazakhstan) as the cost of the ‘reasonable adjustments’ needed to allow her to work there would not (said the FCO) have been reasonable. And […]
