Nick Cohen puts a grammatically challenged question: Who (sic) would you rather trust – the BBC or a blogger? Back in about 1992 I was moved for the first time ever to write a letter to the BBC to complain about a news-clip from South Africa (where I had just […]
Dan Hannan MEP has delivered a blow to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a terse but sharp address in the European Parliament which has been picked up on YouTube and seen by hundreds of thousands of people: Dan is well on the libertarian end of the political spectrum in the UK, so it […]
My Blogoir statistics creep upwards nicely, with over 5000 Unique Visitors this month. Most visitors swing by briefly, such being the ephemeral nature of the genre. But up to 10% of visitors browse around for the best part of an hour. Which suggests that they are at least intrigued and/or interested/engaged in what […]
Yesterday I was at Trent College near Nottingham to give a talk to pupils on Great Negotiations of Our Time, namely: The Individual v The Collective Knowledge v Belief Today v Tomorrow By way of elucidation for their educational edification I managed to squeeze in Mr Incredible, the Joker, Clint […]
Former diplomat Simon Dickson has some positive things to say about FCO bloggers following a seminar he attended: How do they assess their success? For a couple, they are among the first bloggers in their respective countries, which should score a few credibility points for UK plc. Some quote instances where […]
President Obama’s much-praised message of friendship to Iran got a dusty public response from the Iranians, including some nice imagery: The new US president sends us a Persian New Year greeting message but in the same accuses us again to support terrorism and to be after nuclear weapons," the supreme […]
A reader sends me this striking quote from Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, spoken in the novel by Sindonia, the brilliant Sephardic Jew: I always look upon Diplomatists as the Hebrews of politics; without country, political creeds, popular convictions, that strong reality of existence which pervades the career of an eminent citizen […]
In the second half of 2011 Poland holds the EU Presidency for the first time. To get you in the swing of Poland and the EU, here is a new blog by my friend the excellent Polish Gazeta journalist Dominika Pszczólkowska: Poland in the EU. The point about reading Blogs […]
As I have previously noted, Diplomatic Blogging by serving diplomats is fraught with complications: The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can’t work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government […]
Some rather disobliging words have been written by former Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullins in his memoirs about an allegedly garrulous senior British diplomat : ‘a fifty-something, chain-smoking (what is it about ambassadors in this part of the world) woman’ who is ‘oh, so noisy’. So, of course, the media have been busy tracking […]
