A reader sent me this email message on New Year’s Eve: I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year. "Spark of hope" indeed! More power to you! What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup – that’s this website! […]
Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world: Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to […]
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers. No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus […]
To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that. Thus yesterday: We awoke this morning to various commentators […]
A lively day. First, I spent the night in a wonky hotel in downtown Lewes. The room sloped alarmingly in two directions, to the point where anything smooth risked sliding off the table. The sign in the bathroom read thusly: “Shower Mat Ensure the suckers are in contact with the […]
Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone. If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced! Not that it is perfect. Too many rather […]
Today family friend Oliver Cromwell has married Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hurrah! The best man needed some support with the speech, so I helped out. Best Man (BM) speeches are among the most important any male may have to give in life. They are even more occasion-specific than other speeches. Some weddings involve […]
Talking of speeches, the problem with being a speechwriter is simple. The better you are, the less anyone should know. Why? Because if you help write a speech for someone and it goes down well, that someone is likely to want to claim all the credit for the fine words […]
From today’s Sun on the poignant story of a very fat woman who was dumped by her fiance for an even fatter one – see the third para: Amanda Hart, 25, had a whirlwind romance with Matt Kemp, 27, when she met him online after struggling for years to find […]
Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008? I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing […]
