Here is a tricky one which I heard about recently. You are a senior civil servant preparing a confidential paper for Ministers on your experiences on the ground in an intervention hot-spot. You list various recommendations for the way forward. But your main concern is that the British troops and […]
The appointment of Sir John Sawers as head of MI6 continues to give the public shock and awe. Their care-free former lifestyle which my family and I once joined at their luxury penthouse holiday pad high on a Cornwall cliff is no more.
Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, who is gay, has started writing personal letters of congratulations to British diplomats who show public support for gay rights. He is praising them for such support even if it draws anger from national governments or local homophobic groups… In a letter to […]
Diplomatic manoeuvrings go on as London and EU partners ponder how best to respond to the Iranians’ bullying of British Embassy locally employed staff: European Union governments summoned Iranian ambassadors to protest against the detentions. An EU official told the BBC that, in addition, visas for Iranians holding Iranian diplomatic […]
e-Diplomacy in action? Or e-Diplomacy inaction? Here is a version of the piece I wrote for the latest issue of DIPLOMAT magazine on how I invented e-Diplomacy and tried to put it into effect in a nervous FCO, too many years ahead of my time… e-Diplomacy: Who Isn’t My Neighbour? Where Julius […]
A pertinent comment from Spy Blog (Watching Them, Watching Us) on my posting below, asking about diplomatic gossip about expellees and asking whether the absence of names of expelled diplomats ‘taints’ others who might be leaving normally. First, gossip. You can’t and shouldn’t and won’t stop gossip. But it’s not […]
Mary Dejevsky (who should and I suspect does know better) has written about all the problems we create for ourselves by employing local staff in our Embassies. Read it for yourself. My reply as posted in a comment on the site: Most of this is a forlorn attempt to crank […]
A reader writes re my posting on Locally Employed Embassy Staff: Yes, but you are rather glossing over the fact that a brutal regime can be far more brutal to its own nationals than it can to foreign diplomats. Indeed protection from brutality is the origin of the convention of […]
Stephen Robinson in the Evening Standard looks at the Iranian Embassy in London and the capacious UK Embassy in Tehran, with a rather gloomy assessment of the current Iranian Ambassador: Shortly after Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory, Hossein Adeli was recalled and replaced with His Excellency Rasoul Movahedian Attar, who the Foreign […]
The UK’s diplomatic problems with Iran have featured mutual expulsions of diplomats: Britain is to expel two Iranian diplomats as a tit-for-tat response after Iran forced the same number of British diplomats to leave, Gordon Brown revealed this afternoon. "It is with regret that I should inform the House that […]
