A good question. In fact really the only question in foreign affairs is this one: Does Bad Behaviour have Bad Consequences? Now we have one answer in the awesome ruling in the High Court yesterday that HM Government had been wrong in law in blocking corruption investigations under official pressure from […]
An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party’s "fractious" divisions around John McCain’s foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh. This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been […]
President Bush has given a speech on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq intervention. Here is the full text. Of course all sorts of people think that this intervention has been nothing but a Disaster which needs all the adjectives from Dave Spart’s thesaurus to describe it. […]
I have been reading General Rupert Smith’s much praised book The Utility of Force and mulling over the review by former colleague Oliver Miles of Jonathan Steele’s book Defeat about the ‘doomed occupation of Iraq’. Doomed? Hmm. Maybe it depends how you do it..?
After returning from Zagreb I hit the Eurostar to Brussels to join for the first time as a trainer a good CPDS training course aimed at improving the quality of political reporting and analysis produced by EU officials. In one exercise the participants had to draft an urgent short report about the implications of […]
Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office’s posting policy. I think. Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all […]
My own near-death experience with Leaks came back in the mid-1980s when I was in the FCO Planning Staff as the official speech-writer for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe. Part of the job involved checking draft speeches prepared by other FCO Departments, usually with a view to effecting radical improvements […]
Lots in the media (see eg here) about the Prosecution decision not to proceed with charges against FCO official Derek Pasquill on leak charges. Disclaimer: I do not know Derek Pasquill. I do not not know what prompted his leaking of the papers concerned, nor how he did it and what he […]
Once upon a time the FCO did not have its ‘24/7 Response Centre’. It had a Resident Clerk. Not a single person, but a group of London-based diplomats at First Secretary level who took it in turns to work once a week at night, perched in a room awash in faded glory high […]
Back in April 1986 I was the FCO Resident Clerk on duty on the night US warplanes attacked a number of targets in Libya. The then British Government led by Margaret Thatcher of course knew this was coming, having given permission for some of the US aircraft to deploy from […]
