I’ve been busy writing this and that and getting ready for my next trip to Kazakhstan – leaving for the airport in an hour or so. This time it is give TWO courses in Speechwriting and Public Speaking. Kazakh oratory is set to explode! Check out my longer piece in […]
BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages: In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the […]
Just look at this. A Guardian report about a large and rather over-excited football banner brought into a Belgian football stadium: The banner which said Red or Dead referred to the Standard colours and also showed a drawing of a masked man with a knife and the head of Anderlecht […]
Very sad news this morning. Jozef Oleksy, one of Poland’s smartest politicians, has died. Oleksy (see a Wikipedia summary here) was one of those smart former communists (he was for a while a secret informer for Poland’s communist military intelligence) who smoothly made the transition to European social democracy after […]
Back in the mists of time I wrote this: In a city there’s a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily. One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner. This happens […]
Veteran readers will recall my various pieces here about former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan turned voluble radical contrarian, Craig Murray. Read them all here. He is back in the news again, in what the Scots wittily term a braw stooshie (fine old ding-dong). His bid to run as a candidate for […]
Attentive readers will recall my Near Death Experience in an NHS hospital back in 2011, and the thoughts it prompted on how a large UK hospital works: In one banal way of looking at it, the NHS is a huge quasi-shop. It has ‘customers’ who need ‘products’, so the key […]
UPDATE The key zero-zero soundbite in this speech (below) is already causing controversy for being, how best to put this, simply wrong. Ed Miliband has been quick to put out a subtly different version to try to fix the mess! But the original tendentious version is still out there proudly on […]
Does the Foreign Office discriminate against women diplomats, as evidenced by the fact that there has never been a woman Ambassador to Washington or Paris or the UN or EU? No. My latest piece at Telegraph Comment explains what is going on: Some 15-20 new “fast-stream” diplomats (those deemed capable […]
