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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Being a serious former Ambassador Oliver Miles manages to give the lame FCO diplo-blogging genre the thrashing it richly deserves AND do so in an elegant Guardian article: Why do diplomats (and Whitaker’s article quotes some examples from Americans as well as the British) feel the need to let it […]
Is neatly hosted by Philobiblon. Who leads us to two stories of state-sponsored appallingness here in England. The tale of the non-equipped ambulance. And the grotesque behaviour of Hackney Council. Yes, we pay taxes so that these people can get paid to treat us with contempt.
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 […]
Former Ambassador turned ‘activist’ Craig Murray is a commendable phenomenon for self-publicity. His website now attracts a considerable following, far higher than this modest effort. But he achieves this in part by rehashing old FCO material, and noisily claiming to gullible readers that it shows all sorts of things (eg ‘complicity […]
The second and final round of Poland’s Presidential elections takes place today. Bronislaw Komorowski (Citizens Platform) is hoping not to get pipp’d at the post by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (Law and Justice), twin brother of President Lech Kaczynski who died in the Smolensk disaster. Which of them is the more ‘right-wing’? […]
