Update: welcome Guido readers Imagine you are William Hague or Hillary Clinton, pressed with a real sense of wanting to Do Something to help the Libyan masses. You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. […]
(Apologies to Iain Dale’s readers and other readers – an earlier version got garbled) Ed West at the Telegraph puts the issue with commendable boldness: No Arab country has ever produced a democracy, or at least a lasting democracy; none of the 22 member states of the Arab League are classified […]
What drivel is gushing out now from assorted progressives, variously blaming Tony Blair, the Blair Doctrine and his ‘hypocrisy’ for propping up Gaddafi. See this embarrassment posted by Channel 4 by self-styled Gurublog. And this even worse posting at Liberal Conspiracy by Claude Carpentieri: Imagine if you had a quid each time […]
A long post. Go and grab a coffee. Right at the very very start of this blog in January 2008, I wrote about one of most vivid pieces of work in the FCO, my paper about MTS and Non-MTS back from 1984 in Belgrade. Here’s the link. The idea was […]
You can always rely on the hard-left Seumas Milne in the Guardian to articulate the far opposite of what any normal person is thinking – a handy public service he gives us here, helping us all formulate our thoughts so precisely in opposition to his. Click on the picture above his latest article […]
The Egypt drama is producing floods of very shallow analysis waters. Seumas Milne in the Guardian can always be relied upon to give us the Left Dimwit view, complete with added Dave Spart adverbs: The manoeuvres at the top of the regime have transparently been choreographed in Washington … more […]
Trite (and tritely wrong) comparisons are being drawn between what is happening in different Arab countries and the collpase of European communism. My thoughts: Egypt‘s Berlin Wall Moment? Back in 1990/91 first the Warsaw Pact then the Soviet Union keeled over and died. In the arc of decadent national socialist […]
I remember a senior American diplomat arriving at the FCO in 1992 and describing just how busy he was helping get US food aid to a Russia left reeling after the abrupt collapse of communism. We genteel Brits were startled when he described himself as ‘drinkin’ from a pressure-hose’. The imagery! Still, […]
Egypt faces more or less spontaneous mass unrest aimed at toppling President Mubarak, who has been in power too long for anyone’s good. Great swathes of Egypt’s Internet access has been shut down. James Cowie is following: This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in […]
PM David Cameron made an important statement to Parliament about the latest EU Summit. Full text here (written it must be said in commendably clear language). Though you’d never guess from our snow-infested news bulletins, this was a really important gathering from which, by the usual standards of such gatherings, […]
