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 […]
Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn wants to discuss gender apartheid – but only with women, of course: Corbyn said: “Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages. “My intention would be to […]
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 […]
UPDATE: More! * * * * * How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail? This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of […]
I reappear after weeks of running around the planet from one place to the next. We are putting together a bid for Media Skills training for senior international officials. An interesting issue in all media training is how best to understand/practise the many different sorts of interview that you can […]
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, […]
Back again. Here’s my latest Commentator piece, on the Greek referendum: Greece has long been seen as a disaster waiting to happen, and that disaster is now happening. Greece for far too long (a) has spent beyond its means, but worse (b) has not invested borrowed money wisely, and worst […]
My latest piece at DIPLOMAT has another gallop round some of the issues surrounding Mass and Velocity in diplomacy: The EU’s common foreign policy is particularly prone to piling on Mass but losing Velocity. Lots of European countries intoning the same policies, but struggling to take decisions to implement any […]
I’m sure that these heroic tweaks would make some difference to my own laboured blogging efforts. But, frankly, I just can’t be bothered. It all looks a bit too desperate somehow.
Remember that fleeting row about the leaked record of conversation between SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon and the French Ambassador that amused the UK general election campaign for at least ten minutes? First it wasn’t even a memo at all – it was a fiendish ZINOVIEV MEMO INVENTED BY MI5 aimed at […]
