Obama fan Camille Paglia looks at that Cairo speech, and is less impressed than she had hoped to be. Thus: Obama’s speech (which I read rather than heard) seemed to my teacher’s eye like a strong first draft rather than a polished final product… The Cairo speech is well-organized, ticking […]
Orwell Prize-winner Johann Hari is the new generation’s answer to Polly Toynbee, a turbo-charged Progressive who pops up all over the place. It was he, you recall, who wrote a wildly wrong account of the railcrash episode in Atlas Shrugged: Indeed, her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that […]
The symbol of Warsaw is a mermaid, even though Warsaw lies some way from the sea. Here is my successor HM Ambassador to Warsaw Ric Todd in a sandpit showing a playful mermaidish mode. Separately, the Embassy has been hosting a reception for gay rights activists as a gesture of support […]
Undeterred by doing worse than the British National Party in the 2005 election result in Blackburn, former Ambassador Craig Murray is back on the campaign trail. He is running as a local lad independent candidate in the North Norwich by-election, under the slogan "honest people can fight back". And he is going […]
How to explain the frantic efforts of Gordon Brown to stay at No 10? One seriously insane theory I have heard, and NB it is insane, runs as follows. Remember that idea that Tony Blair wants to be the first ‘President of Europe’ once the Lisbon Treaty comes into force? That […]
Alex Massie perceptively wonders whether there is anything to be done with North Korea other than Doing Nothing (Much), as every other option is fraught with problems. He kindly says that he would like to hear from me on the subject. Always pleased to oblige. Here goes. A policy is […]
Here is the full text of President Obama’s Cairo speech. It had many strong points. A friendly, open-hearted yet serious and businesslike tone. Lots of inclusive words such as ‘respect’ and ‘partnership’. Some quite firm lines on Israel and its right to exist, to the point of being seen as surprisingly […]
Last night I was back again at the Frontline Club to hear Allan Little talk to Nick Hawton about the latter’s new book The Quest for Radovan Karadzic: When everybody else seemed to have given the hunt, one journalist doggedly followed his trail, travelling from the snow-capped mountains of Montenegro […]
Michael Yon has built up a great reputation for going to look at tough places under his own steam and reporting on them to an Internet readership. Here he is following a major US diplomatic push in Asia (not something much covered in the UK). US Defence Secretary Gates talks […]
David Hannay (now Baron Hannay of Chiswick) is one of the most brilliant diplomats of my long FCO years. When he was British Ambassador at the UN his telegrams were extraordinary. Any international issue you could think of, summarised in two terse pages, a written combination of analytical insight and operational […]
