My former FCO colleague the legendary Alyson Bailes alas has died, at the age of 67. Here is her Guardian obituary quoting Sir Kim Darroch: Her flair for languages was remarkable. She spoke and read French, Hungarian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish at what she herself described as […]
How is Poland doing these days under new management? Not so well according to Bloomberg: Polish Stocks Count $50 Billion Cost One Year After Duda Win Twelve months on from Andrzej Duda’s surprise initial victory in Poland’s presidential elections, stock investors are fleeing the country. And there’s little sign they will […]
So, my foray to Cambridge for that Cambridge Union UK/EU debate ended (as I expected) in a huge win for the Remain tendency, ably led by Lord Ashdown. He concluded the debate for the Remain side with a rousing speech that seamlessly combined sound points (“The only world leader who will […]
A reader asks very pertinent Brexit questions: Is the referendum we are having on 23rd June our only chance to leave the EU? In other words, if we voted to stay in this time, would we ever be able to, or have another opportunity to leave again? There seems to […]
The arrest of Radovan Karadžić back in 2008 prompted me to write at some length about him and his life and times. See here. Two pieces read nicely now. This one: Karadžić looks to have been a second-rate romantic who became improbably entangled in Bosnian nationalist politics and then was […]
The news crashes in of the latest terrorist attacks in Europe, this time in Brussels. Earlier this morning I read this piece by George Friedman about ‘illiberal democracy’ in Poland and Hungary: The point is that liberal democracy as a principle of government has a vast array of possible configurations. […]
My latest for the Telegraph: if V Putin would enjoy #Brexit, does that mean that it’s a bad idea? The end of the Cold War was the moment of moments for radically restructuring Europe’s economic and strategic architecture. Europe’s then leaders blew the opportunity, choosing instead to stick with their […]
Here is an interesting piece about Judith Gough, HM Ambassador to Ukraine, who is accompanied on her posting by her female civil partner: “the first full discussion with a member of the press about life as an out-and-proud ambassador”. Note the desperate improvisation of the FCO scouring its sprawling building […]
Battle is joined. In the coming weeks the bemused UK public will mull over the pros and cons of the UK’s EU membership, and then give their view in a fateful referendum in June. As US ambassador-poet James Russell Lowell put it in the C19: Once to every man and […]
Here’s my latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, on global security or not. It starts with a quote immediately familiar to diligent readers here: WHO SAID THIS (the answer is at the end of this piece)? “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos … Oh, and you […]
