One of the Basic Points I tried to teach my Embassy teams as I ascended through the FCO ranks was, "Never mind all that policy stuff, which will tend to be OK enough. Your job is to get it 200% right on the day!" The best-planned visit or event can become […]
My Blogoir entry on the latest Serbian elections has been run by B92, a leading ‘pro-European’ media outlet in Belgrade. And the comments flow. Mainly negative, which is fair enough. How many Serbs want to hear the views of a former British Ambassador? See eg this one from John Bosnitch who (if it is […]
Plodding round the garden trying to cut the grass, I kept thinking about the momentous words of John Bosnitch! He dismissed me summarily on B92’s site as an "ex-ambassador trying to complete England’s never-ending mission of subduing Serbia as part of its global policy against Russia". Huh? What does JB think […]
Samizdat via Brian Micklethwait wonders what convulsive forces might collide with the UK’s currently volatile political scene: Perhaps the EU will actually inform Britain, publicly, clearly, that it now rules it, and that merely British elections really do indeed now count for absolutely nothing, and maybe the British people will […]
I have established contact with the excellent Tiri, an organisation which works with governments, business and civil society to find practical solutions to making integrity work. Improvements in integrity offer perhaps the single largest opportunity for sustainable and equitable development worldwide. Which reminds me of Robin Cook’s famous visit to Sarajevo in […]
Serbia has voted again. Last time round in February Boris Tadic – the ‘pro-Europe’ candidate – handily beat the Radicals’ Tomislav Nikolic to stay on as Serbia’s President. This time round in new Parliamentary elections brought about by the political convulsions of the Kosovo independence decision the Tadic bloc of […]
Not long before I left Belgrade in 2003 I had a good discussion with the then Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister, Goran Svilanovic. An astute operator. He said that one of the problems in dealing with the EU is that "you don’t do deals. The Americans love deals, but you […]
Back in 2001 when I had been Ambassador in Belgrade for only a few weeks not long after the fall of Milosevic, I was asked to give oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. Here it is. It reads pretty well now as a summary of […]
EU Referendum’s thoughts on why a ‘European Foreign Policy’ is not a good idea got me thinking. What actually is ‘Foreign Policy’ anyway? Could the EU in fact be good at some aspects of it but not all? What are the pros and cons for the UK of ‘More Europe’ in the […]
Back in 1998 in Sarajevo I gave a speech to The Congress of Bosniac Intellectuals. In it I talked about the role of ‘ethnic’ political parties and identity politics, praising the thoughtful words of Bosnian writer Ivan Lovrenovic: He said that the first step in renewing Bosnia and Herzegovina was the […]
