What do British diplomats in Europe do all day? Here is a fine example of the Embassy in Warsaw taking an idea (in this case advancing the prospects for disabled people in Poland as part of an EU-wide move in this area), then finding senior Polish partners and moving things […]
A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’. Very difficult to say, because it’s a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail. My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the […]
Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims. (Update: picking […]
Was HM Government ‘complicit’ in torture? No, says MI6 head Sir John Scarlett. A slightly more nuanced line comes from Ministers David Miliband and Alan Johnson: Yet intelligence from overseas is critical to our success in stopping terrorism. All the most serious plots and attacks in the UK in this […]
For the actual swearing-in ceremony of so-called President Ahmadinejad in Iran, HM Ambassador Simon Gass brusquely elbowed his deputy Patrick Davies out of the way and attended to represent The Queen. To the displeasure of The Times: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that it had dispatched the ambassador because the […]
My former Deputy from the Embassy in Warsaw, the redoubtable Patrick Davies, opted for a sleepy posting in Tehran after all the turmoil of Polish politics. Imagine his surprise to find himself splashed in the Times – for attending a ceremony at which Iran’s spiritual leader officially endorsed President Ahmadinejad. […]
I have been struggling with my paper on military/civilian cooperation in ‘fragile states’. It is easy to think that the whole business is hopeless. It is just not possible in the short time-scales we all can cope with these days to work out how best to achieve Stability while maintaining Legitimacy. Not […]
I was over at the UK’s international development department (DFID) today, talking about the current British attempts to ‘join up’ military and civilian efforts in world trouble-spots. As I was looking at these questions with both the benefit of years of insider experience and now the irresponsibility of non-office, it […]
Once again the Guardian talking sense, this time on the Sir John Sawers’ untimely Facebook story: … the revelations of Lady Shelley surely contain very little that those in search of such information could not find somewhere else in the course of an afternoon. And certainly there seems to be […]
Reader Willie Garvin has sent in several thoughtful contributions in response to my request for personal experiences of donor/military cooperation (or not) on the ground in different hotspots. His basic point is that Western ‘interventions’ in conflict-ridden or fragile states are doomed to fail because the underlying objectives are invariably […]
