On Saturday I head back to the USA for this year’s Professional Speechwriters Association conference in Washington DC next week. My task is to lead a session next Wednesday on the following tricky theme: Career: So you want to expand your rhetorical reach? What you must know to write speeches […]
Here’s the full text of a letter I have sent to The Times on the idea that the Foreign Office budget be slashed by 25% or more. Published today. I don’t yet know how much they used – they’re paywalled! Sir, The values and institutions that have defined world order […]
Let’s look at President Putin’s UN speech, as given by the Kremlin website in English here. For public-speaking fanatics it’s interesting to compare the Kremlin English version with a version as it came through the interpreters – here. He quickly gets into his stride, explaining why the veto power of […]
Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT tackles the morality of the #Eurozone crisis. What happy days they were, when that was all the EU had to fret about! Thus: When the Cold War ended and the eurozone was set up as a massive stride forward in European integration, one of the […]
+++ Update+++ Is this one now off? The West Brom Chairman has gone very public explaining why Mr Berahino will not be moving any time soon: “I have informed Saido that he will not be transferred during this summer window and that he is staying at the club” said Peace […]
I am pleased to say that work is in hand to produce a new print version of my book Speechwriting for Leaders, now being reworked and improved as Speeches for Leaders. In that book I talk about ‘authenticity’ and Boris Johnson: The British politician Boris Johnson shows how to do […]
As Twitter noted, this piece about ISIS and modernity appears to hit Peak Guardian: In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital continually moves across national boundaries in […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, this time on diplomatic training. What exactly do up-and-coming diplomats need to know? In May, I joined international experts pondering such questions at the seventeenth Dubrovnik Diplomatic Forum. Professor Joseph Mifsud of the London Academy of Diplomacy wisely reminded us all of The Ambassadors, […]
The 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres during the Bosnia conflict is prompting renewed interest in what happened and why. To mark the occasion the UK government has tabled a draft UN Security Council resolution on the issue. The current UK Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Edward Ferguson, explains the […]
