Let me describe to you my one and only only encounter with Bono, an influential figurehead who, says Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat, is “almost as important as governments” and (according to surveys!) “already more trusted”. It was on 21 December 1997, in Mostar. Mostar was one of the cities most wrecked by […]
Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat says that old-fashioned diplomacy has had its day: Conventional embassies and their ambassadors are equally ill-suited to today’s challenges. The European foreign service, whose embryonic form already exists in the Council Secretariat, is awaiting its first orders once the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified. Like […]
John Redwood and Denis MacShane have been debating the growing UK total contribution to the EU Budget. So let’s go back to how it was negotiated in 2005. Previous postings (in date order for ease of following the story) are: here here and here In a nutshell, the EU Budget had to grow as […]
A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’. Very difficult to say, because it’s a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail. My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the […]
As the world forgets about Honduras again, the former President’s hopes of returning to power look to be ebbing. Soon the country will be looking to new elections. Hurrah. Here is an interesting piece about how the Organisation of American States might have managed its diplomacy differently. By suspending Honduras […]
Have soared! The Treasury statistics show that the UK’s net contribution to the EU will increase from £4.1 billion this year to £6.4 billion in 2010/11… Last night the Conservatives branded government "incompetence" for the rise in contributions. The Opposition said the increased payments were the result of the "selling […]
Commenting on my link to Sarah Palin’s arguments on tort reform, reader Daniel Simpson mysteriously asks whether I have read Private Eye? Private Eye, for non-British readers, is a British Institution. For nearly five decades now it’s been serving up a capricious mix of insider gossip, scandal and satire/wit which […]
Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism: Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which […]
One thing we Brits (sic) like to do (see this blog and many others) is to pore over the ethnic and other divisions in countries beyond our fog-bound shores and try to come up with ingenious outcomes for them. See eg Bosnia/Afghanistan/Kashmir/Cprus and so on and on. You name a conflict […]
Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims. (Update: picking […]
