Madam Crawf and I have been back to South Africa (where I was posted in the final years of apartheid). This time we spent ten days in and around the Kruger Park. The first and most striking thing we found was that things are startlingly cheap. Back in the late […]
My latest DIPLOMAT article on migration and refugees had this dismally prescient passage (emphasis added here): According to the Office of The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2014 on average some 40,000 people a day were driven from their homes by conflict or persecution and compelled to find […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, on the EU and its refugee/migrant crisis: Who exactly is a citizen of state X? And what rights (if any) does a person who is not a citizen of state X have (a) to enter state X and (b) to stay there? The answer? […]
Sad news that Lord Howe has died. I had the great honour to serve as FCO speechwriter for him from 1985-87 when he was Foreign Secretary. Of course back then before email and word-processors speechwriting was a ponderous business, with drafts being typed and retyped on hi-tech golfball typewriters by […]
Back from the Professional Speechwriters Association conference in Washington. A pleasure to meet so many smart and engaging professionals from the wide and varied world of speechwriting. Not least the pugnacious but gracious Hal Gordon, a co-contributor to PunditWire, whose startling knowledge of Othello puts me well to shame. And many others. […]
Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn wants to discuss gender apartheid – but only with women, of course: Corbyn said: “Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages. “My intention would be to […]
My latest piece for Commentator looks at Jeremy Corbyn’s hankering after witchcraft: Collectivist socialism takes it for granted that the fuel of disciplined individual creativity which creates society is like the milk from a cow that can be milked without limit. It assumes witchcraft. When the cow finally keels over, exhausted and […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
As Twitter noted, this piece about ISIS and modernity appears to hit Peak Guardian: In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital continually moves across national boundaries in […]
I reappear after weeks of running around the planet from one place to the next. We are putting together a bid for Media Skills training for senior international officials. An interesting issue in all media training is how best to understand/practise the many different sorts of interview that you can […]
