I liked Clare Short when I first met her in Bosnia a couple of years later. Her febrile anti-Americanism aside, she was tough-minded, down-to-earth and perspicacious on Bosnian issues. Why did someone as smart as Clare Short get that letter to the Zimbabwe government so wrong? Let’s look at the context. […]
Every now and again you read a review where the writer has been given the space to explain in quite some detail and with unrelenting passion why a book or film gets it utterly wrong or right. Take this review of The Reader. I get the definite impression that Frederic […]
We had the privilege last week of joining a small private dinner in London in honour of Baroness Thatcher. I took the opportunity to congratulate her on her unswerving insistence on Honest Money. See eg this speech in 1984: Today we have the lowest rate of inflation since the 1960s. […]
Warming to my theme on how the West probably has made the Zimbabwe problem worse, I think that Clare Short letter in 1997 to Minister Kumbirai Kangai MP deserves a close look from the point of view of professional civil service technique. So, here goes. George Foulkes has reported to […]
I did not make the Orwell Prize ‘longlist’. Sigh. You’re right. I am twisted and bitter about it. A good number of the blog entries submitted by the Longlist winners have little if anything to do with politics, and in certain cases little if anything to do with good writing. […]
Who does not swing by Arts & Letters Daily, if not daily at least often? Here is the sparkling Denis Dutton, the force behind it: What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to […]
My new observations on this ever-fascinating subject are in the latest Total Politics (free registration needed for the E-zine). See eg: Yeltsin’s Moscow before that (1993-96) was fascinating in big policy terms, but a grinding, debilitating place to live in. In late August the air abruptly went chilly as the Russian […]
Here is a good account of where Mark Steyn hit the target and missed a few too when he met the Canadian Standing Committee on Government Agencies of the Ontario legislature recently, to explain why he is unimpressed with the state of free speech in Canada: Looking back, I can’t […]
On day one! Otherwise a new British Conservative government has failed! Thus: On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to […]
Iain Dale carries a well-turned interview with David Cameron. Both interviewer and subject emerge well from a civilised and intelligent exchange. This caught my eye: How will you defend the right to offend?This goes back to the ‘do you listen’ question, because on the one hand you don’t want someone […]
