My latest Ukraine/Russia piece for Telegraph Comment today must have been good – it has smoked out an unusually nasty set of Russian trolls. Here it is: Negotiation is often presented as a choice between carrot and stick: what can one side do to affect the positive or negative incentives […]
Here is my look at the speech at the 2005 Auschwitz commemoration by Vladimir Putin: I was there as British Ambassador to Poland, standing behind the rows of world leaders. It was dark and cold: a painful minus 8 degrees C. We lucky lesser VIPs at the back could move around […]
BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages: In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the […]
I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting. I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good: Moscow, 1997. […]
Very sad news this morning. Jozef Oleksy, one of Poland’s smartest politicians, has died. Oleksy (see a Wikipedia summary here) was one of those smart former communists (he was for a while a secret informer for Poland’s communist military intelligence) who smoothly made the transition to European social democracy after […]
At last. My new ebook Speechwriting for Leaders is out. Hurrah. General blurb and a link for international readers here. UK folk can (and must) buy it through Amazon here. Meanwhile over in Poland – as if by magic – a vivid row has erupted over the fact that I […]
Veteran readers will recall my various pieces here about former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan turned voluble radical contrarian, Craig Murray. Read them all here. He is back in the news again, in what the Scots wittily term a braw stooshie (fine old ding-dong). His bid to run as a candidate for […]
UPDATE: An interesting take on all this by Marc Champion – does Vladimir Putin in fact want a deal? * * * * * Today I watched online most of the three hours of Vladimir Putin addressing a huge media throng in Moscow. Here’s my thoughts as given to the […]
Events in Russia’s economy are accelerating in the wrong direction. No doubt at some point things will pick up again. But for now the trends are ghastly. Amidst all the analysis of what is ‘really’ causing the rouble to slump, this one by James Miller reads well: What is the […]
The Internet offers endless hours of amusement watching Russian (and to be fair others’ too) car crashes. Russia seems to be especially well endowed with footage of these startling episodes, as its drivers like to carry a karkam, a small forward-pointing video camera on the dashboard. This is useful if there […]
