Back in 2006 I had an amicable email joust with London on the subject of our Balkans policy, consistency or otherwise thereof. The point was made by HQ that the FCO would be a depressing place if we did not have lively disagreements or felt that our policy was watertight. To […]
A controversy over David Cameron’s supposed views on a British Government-supported programme to take sixth form pupils to Poland to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp complex has drawn attention to that programme which has been ticking over already in different forms for some nine years. This programme is a Good Thing, even if the […]
This rather overexcited piece on the attack on the US Embassy in Belgrade is catching some attention. The author is one Stephen Schwartz, former Trotskyist-style Leftist who has undergone a metamorphosis into a sui generis new category of moderate US Muslim neocon. Nice niche marketing. One thing about Trotskyists (and it seems former […]
The performance of the senior MEPs who are trying very hard indeed to limit access to a damaging report on MEPs’ possible abuse of expenses is at once revealing and disturbing on so many levels that one scarcely knows where to start offering a view on it. Suffice for now […]
The time is coming when the full story of my leaked email about the EU Budget and a Chinese alarm-clock will have to be told. For now just to say that the story frisked round the Internet for a short while. I alas was not famous for even fifteen minutes. More like two […]
My former colleague from my South Africa days Roy Reeve is now leading a vast mission to export EU police and justice systems to Kosovo. This startlingly expensive exercise aimed at a fast-forward modernizing of Kosovo in a way a goose is forcibly fattened to produce foie gras will quickly come up against […]
When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?" Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean? Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus: a small number of […]
How to make sense of the Kosovo/Kosova independence issue? Kosovo is diplomacy’s elephant’s graveyard, a bleak place where our best hopes and strategies and principles forlornly creep away to die. There is nothing uniquely special or principled or even self-evidently fair about the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demand that […]
Not long before the Dayton Peace Conference negotiations started in November 1995, the Contact Group met in Moscow to discuss how it all should go. The European members of the Contact Group decided to have an informal consultation before we met the Americans and then had the full Group meeting […]
The modern FCO like other British government departments is awash with ever-changing objectives/targets/priorities/strategies/goals, or whatever new jargon word they plan to seize on. In some deep sense a Plot has been Lost – such protean schemes show a striking inability to cope systematically with reality. Regardless of what the latest dizzy […]
