Have you heard of anyone called Greg Pytel? The name rang no bell with me either until this morning, when this annoying peevish message arrived: Dear Mr Crawford, Over a year ago I wrote an article "Regulating financial risks" (it was also reprinted by a couple of financial websites like […]
Back from baking amazing Dubai. Impressions to be recorded separately. Check out this superb piece of work from Frances Coppola, ‘one-time professional banker’, on the difference between between being ‘illiquid’ and being ‘insolvent’. The key point to grasp is that you are 100% bust if you can not pay your […]
Early tomorrow I head to Dubai, my first-ever visit there to give some workshops on Chairing, Negotiation and Cross-cultural Communication. Here’s a press release about it put out by the organisers, Pinnacle PR. If anyone out there wishes to get in touch with me while I am in Dubai next […]
Wikipedia helps us in working out how fast Lord Reith is rotating in his grave as the BBC sinks lower and lower: Rotational speed can measure, for example, how fast a motor is running. Rotational speed and angular speed are sometimes used as synonyms, but typically they are measured with […]
I have written at length here and else where about the moral and policy challenges arising from engagement with wicked regimes elsewhere in the world. See this piece in January about the lawsuit against former MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen over his alleged role in ‘rendition’ to Libya: In the real world […]
Here is my latest Telegraph blog piece, this time on the dilemmas in negotiating with a country such as North Korea where the usual options of Persuasion, Carrot or Stick seem to make little impact: Many humans (and even some governments) aren’t donkeys. So another layer of analysis applies. As […]
In case you have not yet had enough about FCO foreign language policy, here’s my first full piece for the Daily Telegraph (ie newspaper + website) on the subject, distinguished on many levels but above all for craftily slipping some words of Serbian into the piece to show how clever […]
Israeli superspy Jay Pollard – serving out the final years of his life prison sentence in the USA – is unwell. My own modest link to the Pollard story is here. Not to ignore here. Wikipedia blithely glosses over Pollard’s academic links to me, but the general explanation of what the […]
Here is a scary piece at the Telegraph bewailing the supposed decline in British diplomats’ foreign language skills. Which draws on some information extracted from the FCO by a Parliamentary Question. And quotes me: Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland and a speaker of Serbian, Russian, Afrikaans and French has […]
Here is what appears to be the first-ever speech by a UK Foreign Secretary (maybe the first-ever speech by any Foreign Minister) on consular work. And v effective it is too. I have written here about some aspects of consular work under Labour, not least the appalling Three Ps which […]
