Update Welcome Browser readers A kind reader sent this comment: … while following the Holbrooke trail on your site I stumbled upon MARS, VENUS AND EXTREMISM … imho a brilliant disentangling of issues as alive today as when you gave the address. Should be framed This prompted me to re-read it – it’s a speech […]
Dick Holbrooke’s sudden death is a blow to American diplomacy. His cleverness, his relentlessness, his raw humour, his skilled psychological pressure-plays and sheer bravura all combined with a sense of boldly wielding power to make him a uniquely formidable force. I have written about my own meetings with on various occasions. See […]
Here in Brussels the already expensive hotel charges an absurd €6+ for an hour’s Internet access, and some €5 for 24 hours’ access. I wonder how these clever hotel chains price Internet access. It’s all about price elasticity of demand – if we add on (or take off) a few more […]
Is hosted by Jackart. Who somewhat ungrammatically draws attention to a lefty blogger’s poor spelling and grammar in her rejection of police handling of the student demonstrations: HarpyMarx gives her perspective of the protests, and her spelling & grammar deteriorates as her anger rises… Oops. I never know quite what to make of […]
A kind reader has sent me the text of the FCO’s Diplomatic Excellence: Our Reform Agenda for the FCO. I’ll read it closely when heading for Brussels for another round of Speechmaking/Speechwriting training for European diplomats. One odd thing – the version put out on the FCO’s staff website is […]
A brisk bucketful of ice-cold reality for the European Union, generously delivered by Barry Eichengreen of UC Berkeley: The economics is really quite simple. Greece has a budget problem. Ireland has a banking problem. Portugal has a private-debt problem. Spain has a combination of all three. But, while the specifics differ, […]
Mulling over diplomats in danger has jogged my memory of a ghastly diplomatic hunting accident in Tito-era Yugoslavia. In those innocent times (1970s) the communist regime in Belgrade would organise hunting expeditions for the Diplomatic Corps to echo Tito’s own love of killing animals. On one such hunt one Ambassador blasted […]
I try to market myself as a public speaker and speech-writer. But I can’t dream of riches like this from mere oratory: Mr Miliband records that he received a “payment of £25,000 for lecture at Sir Bani Yas Forum on Future of Middle East, Abu Dhabi”. … His travel and […]
This is astonishing. President Obama has a Christmas Party with his wife to attend, so leaves a White House press conference to former president Bill Clinton who turns on the impromptu policy charm. With video. Imagine Gordon Brown: Look folks, I have to go to a Christmas Party with my […]
A good general rule is that any organisation starting to talk about ‘excellence’ has a serious mediocrity problem. Excellent people and organisations don’t need to worry about excellence. They just get on with delivering it. Alas the FCO has launched a new scheme intended to help its staff claw their way […]
