Eurozone problem addict? It doesn’t get better than top US economist Martin Feldstein, who has the great advantage of having said right from the start that the project as conceived was unworkable if not dangerous. Here he is explaining in brisk terms what went wrong, before moving on to say what […]
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers. No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus […]
To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that. Thus yesterday: We awoke this morning to various commentators […]
Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone. If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced! Not that it is perfect. Too many rather […]
Croatia is next in line to join the European Union. But this sort of thing, circulated by the eminent Centre for Research into Post-communist Economies, shows that beneath the surface – or even bang on it – a lot of nasty habits and people and instincts inherited from the communist […]
This appears to be a well-sourced Telegraph piece revealing that the FCO has instructed Embassies to start making contingency plans for a Eurozone crash. If so, it’s startling. Startling! Partly because our much-diminished Embassies across the EU – cheerily cut back by Labour and this Coalition government alike to redeploy diplomats […]
Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo’s independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic). Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon: The main interest of the book for […]
Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008? I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing […]
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia’s answer to the BBC’s world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular. As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the […]
Readers here know all about MTS and non-MTS. It seemed a good idea to explain the idea to Telegraph Blog readers. Done here, with a nice stormy seas picture: Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured? One of the metaphors I deployed to explain Bosnia’s […]
