See the wild reaction on the streets of Karachi, as angry but illiterate crowds protest against the British Prime Minister’s remarks about Pakistan and terrorism Tsk. It should either be Loo’s or Loos’. See also the distinguished role being played in the drama by HM High Commissioner to Pakistan, Adam […]
In case you want even more on this business about Cameron/India/Pakistan (or even if you do not), read this businesslike piece by Hasan Suroor in The Hindu. It reminds us helpfully of one footling British diplomatic error after another: This is not the first time that a British leader has […]
My recent piece about the feebleness of Peter Mandelson’s speechwriters looked ahead to the coming international tour of David Cameron to see if his people would do a better job. NB folks, what follows is not about policy as such. It’s about speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are […]
A London court has rejected Serbia’s application to get former Bosnian/Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic extradited to Belgrade to face charges on the infamous Dobrovoljacka Street killings in Sarajevo in 1992. The word ‘rejected‘ perhaps does not do justice to District Judge Timothy Workman’s demolition of Serbia’s case. Perhaps ‘blew to smithereens beyond […]
I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function. "Oh,we have the usual – a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days." Really? Why do you need young […]
A curious article over at Foreign Affairs about the efficacy of democracies in doing better to protect citizens from earthquakes. Is it because democracies are simply richer and so build better buildings? No: In a democracy, leaders must maintain the confidence of large portions of the population in order to […]
Over at Business and Politics I brood on the dismal sniggering by UK business people when the Prime Minister informed them that he had summoned the UK’s Ambassadors back to London – and made them all fly economy class. Inappropriate. If you publicly sneer at your own team, won’t everyone […]
Democratist replies to my earlier posting: I have a number of points to make about the following statements you made in "International Election Monitoring: Keeping Democracy Honest?" "The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that." What about LTOs and the Core Team? They are […]
Democratist is someone who follows the goings-on across the former Soviet Union in some depth. Here he takes up William Hague’s recent speech on UK foreign policy, and makes an interesting point about how the UK invests in foreign policy outcomes in that complicated region: OSCE election observation is about the best […]
Slowly but surely, I feel myself moving from happy to uncomfortable to annoyed with our squeaky clean new government. Not only is it hard to reconcile the ambitious pronouncements of William Hague for a "clear, focused and effective" foreign policy with the major cuts now looming for the FCO as […]
