Here’s a depressing piece at Open Democracy by Turi Munthe, who summarises for us an analysis by Dr Martin Moore and the Media Standards Trust of the steep relative and absolute decline in foreign news coverage in the British newspapers: The statistics make frightening reading. They compared foreign news coverage […]
A night of sheer misery. First, bitter disappointment for Tottenham who beat the European champions by a mere 3-1. Check out this footytube video and its commentary in French, where Gareth Bale is eloquently described as a TGV train as time after time he flies past one of the best […]
P J O’Rourke on the US elections: Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough […]
Back on the road tomorrow, heading for Vienna to give some Israelis and Palestinians some training in basic mediation techniques. Back on Thursday if I survive. Maybe knowing next to nothing about the Middle East will help… While I am away treat yourselves to watching Appleseed: Fierce beautiful warrior babes […]
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is in Moscow. Some thoughts. One of my earliest blog postings from back in 2008 described some of the issues arising from the Russian authorities’ beastly treatment of the British Council. It recorded something said to me by a senior Russian diplomat in 1996 […]
Sorry folks. Fewer Crawford thoughts than usual gushing forth these days. Demand for Diplomatic Training for senior government officials and international organisations is accelerating nicely in popularity, requiring me to start working on preparing a number of different courses such as Networking with Impact, Speechwriting, Crisis Management and so on. Being […]
Are North Korea’s leader, Jack Straw, Neil Kinnock and Fidel Castro by some chance related? Of course. Why? Because they are all part of socalist political family hierarchies, featuring a successful father whose fame and power and influence help propel their relatives to new glory. We all know about Kim […]
The 2010 UK Speechwriters’ Guild conference took place yesterday in beamish Bournemouth. To fine effect. Tobias Ellwood MP purposefully kicked off, closely followed by my own attempt to share some of the operational problems Leaders and their speechwriters face in working out how best to respond to Bad News (examples […]
Awesome Guardian piece on the Cuban regime’s bold plan to stop paying people nothing to do nothing: Authorities announced yesterday they will lay off more than 1 million state employees in the island’s biggest economic shake-up since the 1960s. Cuts begin immediately, with 500,000 jobs due to go by March. […]
The Independent today runs the story of deaf diplomat Jane Cordell’s claim that the FCO unlawfully discriminated against her in refusing to post her to Astana (Kazakhstan) as the cost of the ‘reasonable adjustments’ needed to allow her to work there would not (said the FCO) have been reasonable. And […]
