As I return to Poland today I am reminded of a revealing episode back in (if I recall correctly) early 2006. The Polish Foreign Ministry announced that it planned to revive an earlier tradition of an annual ball in honour of the Diplomatic Community, with a ‘First Post-War Diplomatic Ball’ (ie […]
I return to Poland this week, my first visit back since driving across the border into Germany at the end of September last year. To help prevent Ambassadors from setting themselves up plumply in the country of their final posting, the UK Civil Service has a rule to the effect that former […]
A long self-promoting piece by David Edgar on how generations of ‘renegades’ have left the Left is worth a quick glance, if only to see how some privileged people can end up in a severe state of confusion. Edgar names many renegades. Thus: [C]ommentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew […]
This Guardian piece by Professor Robert Service about NATO/Russia has been noted in Poland. One sentence caught my eye (highlighted): What is more, Russians, from their present and future Presidents downwards, can see no justification for the US to turn states on Russia’s borders into engines of American regional power. […]
The Russian Duma has passed a resolution rejecting claims that the mass starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s amounted to genocide. This AP report on the resolution has been picked up widely. It quotes the resolution thus: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its […]
As I was saying, the 2005 British Presidency decided to help the EU emerge from the French/Dutch referenda debacles by pushing for a new EU Budget. Like everything which is amazingly complicated, this is in fact quite simple. All sides agreed that a bigger EU following the 2004 enlargement meant a […]
Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
My mentioning of Marsport reminded me of another Mars moment in my life. It came in early November 2005. I had sent an email to the FCO team in which I attempted to explain what had happened in Polish politics that previous week, when the wrangling following Poland’s 2005 Parliamentary […]
A controversy over David Cameron’s supposed views on a British Government-supported programme to take sixth form pupils to Poland to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp complex has drawn attention to that programme which has been ticking over already in different forms for some nine years. This programme is a Good Thing, even if the […]
When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?" Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean? Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus: a small number of […]
