Hurrah! You can fight back against burglars in England (as long as you act ‘instinctively’). So proclaims Minister of Justice Ken Clarke: In an historic move, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke yesterday announced a major strengthening of the rights of victims standing up to intruders in their property. It means anyone who […]
Most readers of this website are interested in one way or another in ‘foreign affairs’. As I have described on different occasions here, the heart of international diplomacy is the state. That idea in its modern form emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. Here are some passages from my 2009 […]
A few years back I joined a seminar organised in the margins of a FCO Leadership Conference in London. The discussion focused on global trends. A striking observation was made: “in the past ten years or so we have seen one of the greatest changes in human history–a billion people […]
In case you haven’t seen it already, here is my latest DIPLOMAT article – this one on the flawed first principles underlying the EU’s current problems. It considers several basic principles of the way the EU works and notes that the current crisis is so painful because it is putting […]
Who’s not seen Japanese mayhem movie classic RoboGeisha? It’s all about young ladies who get captured by a wicked arms corporation which turns itself into a giant robot and tries to drop an H-bomb down Mt Fuji to make the Japanese people ‘rise up’. Quite why they would rise […]
Update Apologies for the earlier version – struggling with new voice recognition software… The chaotic rule of Col Gaddafi looks to have ended in predictable, chaotic circumstances. Contradictory reports are flooding in about what exactly has happened to Gaddafi, but it looks pretty safe to bet that something Pretty Bad […]
Update carried also at the Commentator * * * * * Here is Ed Miliband’s Labour Conference speech today – in full. A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from […]
Here’s David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, giving sharp-eyed observations on the UK Speechwriters’ Guild conference last week: Many of these 67 speechwriters from Britain, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Holland and Denmark told me their speakers wouldn’t go for the kind of intimate, personal, emotional authenticity […]
Here’s a comment which I have just posted over at Anna Raccoon’s place, responding to various people who kindly offered their thoughts on an edited version of my longer Commentator piece about the riots. Thus my added points: As the diverse comments above and the wider tsunami of media ‘analysis’ go […]
Here is what the Express says is the text of a strange letter from PM David Cameron’s political private secretary Laurence Mann to a ‘Conservative activist’ (that one seems like a contradiction in terms, but never mind) on the subject of the UK’s membership of the European Union and why an […]
