Soaring sales of Ayn Rand’s books in the USA (Atlas Shrugged is high at number 30 in the Amazon bestsellers list) are rattling supposedly progressive thinkers over here. See eg the Guardian desperately falling back on those two honest thinkers Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek to try to put people […]
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 […]
Here is an eloquent article in Standpoint about claims that back in 1950 a youthful Milan Kundera gave a statement to the communist regime which caused others opposed to it immense suffering. The article has prompted some revealing comments. Here is one asserting that ‘context is everything: … It is further […]
Remember the fuss about the oppressive and unworkable FCO rules on what former diplomats might or might not say in public? We now have new rules! And they are actually sensible. They put the emphasis on intelligent people using their Judgement: The FCO relies on former officials to exercise their […]
Yes. The FCO has taken no action to amend the absurd spelling error on its Promote a low carbon, high growth, global economy webpage. The FCO is still hard at work Proteccting Asia’s rain forest (sic). The page also invites readers to link to latest case studies on our work on […]
The Adam Smith Institute has invited Guido, John Redwood MP and Alex Barker to address an evening seminar on the theme Politics and the Blog. Be there. Or be square.
At a training session for EU officials the other day on Better Briefing, I put up a Powerpoint slide asking the following Question: What is the Supreme Quality in any Brief? Speed Looks at all angles of the problem Clear, reasonable recommendation Readable Accuracy Facts/Opinions/Recommendations kept separate At-a-glance understandable Honesty/integrity […]
Here is a magnificent speech by Peter Oborne on the collapse of Integrity in British public life, delivered at the Centre for Policy Studies on 4 March. He gets to the heart of many things, including the N-word: We have abandoned the idea that there is an independent reality which […]
When I was Ambassador in Warsaw and before the FCO embraced blogging with some enthusiasm, I wrote an in-house blog for a couple of weeks. I was limited to 200 words per entry. The FCO kindly have sent me the entries after my Freedom of Information Act request. So, in case anyone […]
