Diligent readers will remember that now and then I argue with Brian Barder, another former Ambassador turned energetic contrarian. The Assange Saga in its early days gave one such exchange, where we disagreed over how far if at all the UK government might be within its rights to enter the […]
Rummaging around in my website I found this magnificent Islamist forgery that has been doing the global rounds for many years: a letter supposedly from Prime Minister John Major to FCO Minister of State Douglas Hogg urging him to be horrid to the Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniacs). Here it is: […]
The bombastic smirking of Russia’s Victory Day parades is on a quite new scale this year. And why not? How often these days does a country get to boast to itself that it has grabbed part of some other country’s territory and seemingly got away with it? How did we […]
Things have slackened off again here, what with one thing and another. But here is the hefty piece I wrote about Ukraine last week for the Daily Telegraph. To be precise, I did not write it. I dictated it into my iPad from my hotel room in Gjakova (also known […]
A few days ago I posted this piece from Diplomatic Courier about the hopeless public speaking performance by the French and German Foreign Ministers in Sarajevo in 1997 (emphasis added): Where did the two countries’ diplomats organizing this event get things wrong? Basically, neither the Ministers’ respective offices nor their […]
My latest piece at Telegraph Blogs – on state eavesdropping: What safeguards might we want within this wide range of different activities so that the government does all these things reasonably but does not overstep the mark in using information technologies improperly against its own citizens? Something like this: • […]
Long time no blog. Family, Christmas, weather, website upgrades, more weather. the usual. Here I am in my most recent DIPLOMAT piece, on East v West and the benefits or otherwise of the Asian Model of Development: For most of the past 100 years or so, it looked as if […]
The heroic achievement of Nelson Mandela was to end apartheid‘s evil racial legal categorisations and associated injustice in South Africa, right? Alas not: The idea of defining and rewarding citizens by race continued. The argument was that drastic measures were needed to help the mass of people who had lost […]
The ‘Guidance’ document External Speakers in Higher Education Institutions put out by Universities UK (‘the Voice of UK Universities’) is attracting attention, and rightly so, for its proposed approach to ‘segregation’ of men and women at speaking events involving speakers whose religious views require such segregation. The document in fact […]
My creative juices are at a low ebb these days. It must be Global Warming. Hence the feeble presence here and indeed everywhere else apart from off forays on to Twitter. Anyway, I am off to Budapest today to give a presentation on Eavesdropping and Diplomacy. The gift that keeps […]
