Remember the playful mermaids and mermen from HM Embassy in Warsaw? The Independent reports that some of them have got into trouble at the posh Beaver Club over at the Canadian Embassy: Quite what took place in the embassy – a three-storey modernist construction in French limestone and aluminium which won […]
Update: The EU (improbably) as … Dirty Harry. Click through to the wonderful link. * * * * * If I were a diplomat from Mars reporting back to HQ on the wheeler-dealings of the pitiful earthlings in this part of the planet, I’d be starting to suggest that the […]
Question What’s the only thing on any political party’s mind after winning an election? Answer The next election Why? What else do political parties think about? Having won an election because their policies and style had the most appeal, the winners think only about how best to […]
If anyone needs something different from life, and/or wants to hear me talk at some length about my time in Poland and other issues, here are details of my long interview last week with London’s excellent English/Polish radio station Radio Orla.fm. Broadcast tomorrow (Sunday) and again on Monday, and available thereafter […]
Some random thoughts on latest dramatic developments in the UK, all the more random for lack of sleep. First the Really Good News. As for the feverish politics, note the following. It is not only that the new Parliament is ‘hung’, ie no party has an overall majority. It is […]
Election Day across the UK looms. The Labour Party are set to lose power. Hurrah. But will they lose badly enough to be obliterated? Or somehow only enough to stay in business and start scheming anew after some ritual blood-letting? Here’s my own New Labour Story. I joined the FCO […]
Here is the long Mail Online account of the encounter between Gordon Brown and Mrs Gillian Duffy. It squeezes more than maximum juice out of this fleeting encounter, yet the words of Mrs Duffy and the accompanying pictures are touching: ‘There’s been a development,’ she was told by a reporter from […]
Tim Collard, (a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party) offers a jeer in the Telegraph at William Hague’s sensible comment on the FCO Popegate fiasco: William Hague, who expects to be in charge in King […]
I have just spotted this tragic story from 2005, describing how my own leaked email about the EU Budget Negotiations led to someone resigning from his media job in London! With Polish emotion rather than western diplomacy, Kris wanted to recall Crawford to Britain “a country he does not know” […]
With the state funeral of President Kaczynski completed, attention now will turn to the cause of the crash at Smolensk airport. Not before a surprisingly weak article by Denis Dutton and Adam Chmielewski appears at Open Democracy: The air-crash which decapitated Poland’s state elite may owe something to reckless behaviour, […]
