Remember my disagreement about South Africa’s Peaceful Transition? Well, it was so peaceful that they have made a movie about all the violence: "The period between [Nelson] Mandela’s release from prison [February 1990] and the first democratic election [April 1994] was extraordinarily violent. More people died in that four-year period […]
A former top MI6 officer has some brisk things to say about the way foreign policy is made in the UK these days – and the consequences: Mr Inkster said the world was moving from "being policed by America to be policed by nobody" and the danger of an increasingly […]
My colleague Craig Murray throws down the gauntlet; There is an interesting link between Charles and I on torture … All the CIA rendition flights to Uzbekistan came from Szczytno-Szymany in Poland. We now know that the CIA had both use of that airbase and a secret torture prison nearby.https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html I […]
Oh Lordy. Craig Murray has called me the leading FCO sock-puppet on the Internet. Read his characteristically muddled piece for yourselves. Here is the reply which I have posted on his site (Note: links added for ease of reference): Craig, Dear. Oh. Dear. Are you really insinuating that somehow I […]
Can you have too much of a good thing? In some instances, yes. But not when it comes to my Oral Career History as recorded for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (part of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge). Here is my entry. It looks to be […]
Recent media reports have it that my old FCO ‘line manager’ Nicola Brewer has stepped down as CEO of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to replace Paul Boateng as High Commissioner (Ambassador-equivalent in a Commonwealth country) to South Africa. The credibility of this Independent report is wrecked by claims that […]
I hitherto have not ventured very often on to the noisy battlefield of Torture and its diplomatic and political and moral ramifications. Although this posting about the unnoticed and permanently pained victims of terrorist violence says most of what I feel on the issue. I have steered clear because everyone else appears […]
The United States’ policy towards Cuba has failed. So says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And she should be in a good position to know, as her husband presided over this failing policy for eight years. Meanwhile equally ailing and failing Fidel Castro wants the USA to go even […]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian writes about the Impotence of Might: There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter […]
Former Ambassador Brian Barder has been trying to crank up the argument that Guido has to carry a sizeable share of the blame for spreading the odious contents of the McBride emails: … virtually all the smear stories sent privately as possible blog material by McBride to Draper are now […]
