Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
Some good advice via Guido from Dizzy on how civil servants can blog with reduced chance of detection. An interesting area. One of my first blog posts referred to a case of deliberate leaking by an FCO official which reached the courts where the case crashed. Does blogging = leaking? Not […]
(Transparency Note: I met Jonah on a cruise back in 2005 and enjoyed his ideas and company. But we were not lovers.) What to make of Jonah Goldberg’s remarkable (if long) new book Liberal Fascism? Plenty. His basic thesis boils down to three propositions: First, non-trivial parts of today’s Western Leftist/progressive style and […]
Russia chooses a new President tomorrow, 2 March. Without OSCE observers. When did Russia’s leadership start to tip away from seeing European Democracy as the Solution, towards seeing it as a Problem? Maybe around 6 May 1996. In the UK it was a Bank Holiday Monday morning; we expected a normal working […]
As well as obviously political or protest songs put out down the years, there are plenty which draw in an explicit or implicit way rather on the language and practice of diplomacy. And the time has come for a former senior diplomatic practitioner (ie me) to draw the planet’s attention to […]
When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?" Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean? Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus: a small number of […]
Back to sunny Zagreb last week for the first time in some years. I was there to represent ADR Group at the start of a new good EU-funded scheme to help spread modern Mediation practice and procedures in Croatia. Croatia like many former Communist countries has vast traffic-jams in its […]
Back in 1984/85 I was on the FCO’s Aviation Desk for a year, working mainly on Transatlantic air services issues (who could fly when and where and for how much), and in particular on the diplomatic ramifications of Freddie Laker’s antitrust lawsuit against British Airways and other carriers. The core […]
Back in the 1980s many in the FCO still recalled the days when a woman had to resign from the service on marriage – a fact which of course left only a tiny number of senior FCO women at the top of the British diplomatic world 20 years later. That […]
Civil servants of all shapes and sizes have their various dealings with the public. But rarely in this country are formal bureaucratic proceedings available to a wider public to observe. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube we can at least watch some of the remarkable exchanges between an avowedly conservative […]
