Should a civil servant be sacked for posting a disobliging comment about a Minister on a website anonymously, using an official computer to do so? Iain Dale has the link. He asks: Does this strike you as being a bit over the top? What it implies is that there is […]
Is here. It is better than his Cairo speech which had rather too many philosophically incoherent passages. This one is easier to make, of course, as he is aiming it at one country in particular and not at an amorphous ‘Muslim world’. So the key messages can be more finely […]
Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, who is gay, has started writing personal letters of congratulations to British diplomats who show public support for gay rights. He is praising them for such support even if it draws anger from national governments or local homophobic groups… In a letter to […]
I’d never heard of the bestselling r’n’b’n’movie star until her Cessna crashed just after takeoff a week ago. But that’s okay. Nobody’s that popular any more: Popular culture is more accurately characterized these days as a lot of mutually hostile unpopular cultures. So let us take Rochelle Riley, writing in […]
e-Diplomacy in action? Or e-Diplomacy inaction? Here is a version of the piece I wrote for the latest issue of DIPLOMAT magazine on how I invented e-Diplomacy and tried to put it into effect in a nervous FCO, too many years ahead of my time… e-Diplomacy: Who Isn’t My Neighbour? Where Julius […]
An ever-alert reader picks up this curious sentence on the usually well written Samizdata, where Paul Marks is laying in to an Economist article (emphasis added): Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position. "Starting from scratch their (sic) […]
A pertinent comment from Spy Blog (Watching Them, Watching Us) on my posting below, asking about diplomatic gossip about expellees and asking whether the absence of names of expelled diplomats ‘taints’ others who might be leaving normally. First, gossip. You can’t and shouldn’t and won’t stop gossip. But it’s not […]
Let’s leave it to Devil’s Kitchen to tear to shreds the latest utterances of the government in its plans to spend money it does not have on even more profligate scales than now. Let’s instead focus on something missed by D’s K in the offending Telegraph article. A juicy eggcorn: […]
Stephen Robinson in the Evening Standard looks at the Iranian Embassy in London and the capacious UK Embassy in Tehran, with a rather gloomy assessment of the current Iranian Ambassador: Shortly after Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory, Hossein Adeli was recalled and replaced with His Excellency Rasoul Movahedian Attar, who the Foreign […]
This is a legal maxim: No-one gives what he does not have. The basic idea is that if you do now own eg a car but you pretend you do and sell it to someone else, that person can not acquire ownership of the car through that transaction. OK, there […]
