Here’s a story I haven’t told before. Back in the Moscow Embassy in 1994 or thereabouts a bizarre telegram arrived from London. The EU had to negotiate aluminium trade quotas with the new Russia and the EU team was coming to Moscow to do so. But, unusually, the EU aluminium boffins […]
Should there be a UK referendum on our EU membership? If so, when? The answers these days divide neatly: Yes! Now! Maybe. But if we do, let’s choose the right moment and the right question! That latter view of course enrages anyone inclined to the former view as a piece […]
I have not been writing much here or anywhere else. Too busy trying to survive and attending the latest Oxford Programme on Negotiation event. Last night BBC reporter and troubleshooter Lyse Doucet gave a spirited talk to the Programme about international mediation. I of course disagreed with quite a lot […]
Off to Geneva for a couple of days with ADRg Ambassadors to deliver some more senior negotiation skills support work for an International Organisation. Our messages: Find out what the other side wants, to help you work out what you want. If you don’t know what you want, don’t be surprised if […]
How often do we hear that, especially on the Today programme? We face this problem – why doesn’t the government do something? Rarely is the case made is that we have these problems precisely because the government is ‘doing something’ – something absurd. And that by far the best thing […]
American generosity in the form of the Marshall Plan transformed Western Europe after WW2. Hurrah. Everyone knows that. But what did that Plan do or not do? Precisely what did it do? Why did it work? How might any lessons from that initiative be applied to (say) Greece today? Good […]
Here is my latest Telegraph Blog piece about the striking success of young Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who has beaten a senior Lithuanian colleague to become chair of the UN General Assembly in 2012/2013: The position had been uncontested since 1991, the different regional groupings deciding for themselves in […]
Back in distant 2008 I wrote about the vile N-word: What is the precise mechanism which makes people start to talk in arch post-modern jargon? Like this: Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain. Or this: Mr Brown […]
What a dire article over at Bloomberg by one Catherine Hickley, comparing the issues of the possible break-up of the Eurozone with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here’s how not to write such things. First, it seems to me to stretch things a bit to describe the post-Soviet space […]
Isn’t this just about the best summary of Europe’s problems you’ll see? Beyond briliant: … the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not […]
