If you want a scintillating, furious polemic on why the Yes to AV campaign lost so heavily, go no further than Liberal Vision: The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are […]
Tim Worstall points us to what he accurately calls a doozy: a piece by Professor Morgan Kelly about the appalling plight facing an Ireland now impaled on assorted policy outcomes which lead straight to national disaster. It’s readable and unambiguous. Thus: Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to […]
We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away. I […]
Er – worse than expected by whom, I wonder? It’s now not about whether, but when Greece will ‘restructure’ its debts. With a good dash of ‘how’ thrown in. Check out Morningstar which by some chance is very much unrelated to the dull British communist newspaper of the same name. In […]
Here’s a bold idea. That the peoples of the ‘Western Balkans’ (ie mainly the former Yugoslavia area) push out the febrile internationals and sit down for some hard talking: With the Powers pushed out the locals – assuming they actually want to settle their disputes – could then grapple with the choreography […]
Do any diplomats out there recall anything from their careers about the amazing story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, who was kidnapped in 1978 by the North Korean regime but managed to escape in 1986 and seek political asylum at the US Embassy in Vienna? It’s this latter event […]
No sooner had I put out the idea this morning that Gaddafi might do well not to blow Benghazi to bits but instead behave in a more guileful way than the cunning fellow proclaims a ceasefire! I knew of course that he swings by this blog now and again, but […]
Today is the 8th anniversary of the assassination of Serbia’s dynamic young prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. And as the years drift by, Balkan conspiracy theories spread their twisted tentacles in more and more directions. Here for those who can use Google Translator are the mutterings of close Djindjic spin-doctor Vladimir […]
Back in January Venetia van Kuffeler and I interviewed William Hague for DIPLOMAT magazine. Here’s the result. DIPLOMAT’s publishing lead-times mean that it is not a ‘news’ magazine. So we aimed at more general questions exploring the Foreign Secretary’s philosophy and instincts in his job. The interview took place when Tunisia was […]
A sharp-edged piece by James Rogers at European Geostrategy on what Cathy Ashton’s recent Budapest speech tell us about the EU’s vision of itself, or not: "The strength of the EU lies, paradoxically, in its inability to throw its weight around. Its influence flows from the fact that it is […]
