Tomorrow at LVS School in Ascot I am giving a presentation to the public on the general subject of Spies. Always a fascinating theme down the centuries. Plenty about the subject here on my website, including my piece for DIPLOMAT in 2010 that looked briefly at the differences between HUMINT, […]
On the subject of the media, HM Government made a serious effort to crank up positive publicity for the visit to London of Poland’s President Kwasniewski on a State Visit after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. The visit featured a fun photo-shoot swing by the London football ground where […]
Back from a lively session of specialist media training, featuring a no-holds-barred account of my own encounters with the media down the decades. Highlights included: my disastrous exchange with Peter Fabricius in South Africa on the day Mrs Thatcher resigned my first live broadcast on a global news network – […]
This week I have been rummaging around in my memory to find examples of where I did some good media interviews, and where things went awry for some reason or another. As if by magic, one high-profile but short-lived mess returned to my life today. I find South African journalist Peter […]
Part of the charm of writing blog-pieces for national newspapers and being active on Twitter is that you attract all sorts of views. What if many of them are deliberately trollishly offensive? In principle there is nothing to be done about this if you believe in free media. Yet it […]
Here is my latest piece at PunditWire, describing how I dealt with pesky young professionals not paying full attention during my Drafting Skills class last week in Warsaw. The main feature of this one is, of course, the superlative extract from the famous account of how Bertie Wooster is stuck […]
In case you missed it, and I have done my best to miss it, there has been a puny but noisy row in the UK media over a piece in the Daily Mail that pointed out that Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph Miliband, was a communist whose ideas – has they […]
So much going on these days it is scarcely worth bothing to opine on it all. The Nigel Lawson call for the UK to think seriously about leaving the EU is a huge shift. The Unthinkable is being Thought. The US and Russia are trying to get the warring factions […]
My new piece at Commentator on how these new press ‘regulations’ might or might not tackle ‘egregious practices’: So we have no lack of sanctions in this area, formal and informal. Just as we have the strictest laws against killing people. Yet in a country of some 60 million people […]
Here I am at Commentator on the ghastly Leveson Report: First, the Leveson report fails to grasp the most important feature of the current ‘press’ scene, namely that the industrial model of newspapers is busily dying. We are moving back (or more precisely forward) to something much more like the […]
