A handy To-Do list for William Hague as he tries to drain the FCO swamp: … End PoMo gimmicks: Issue instructions that any Ambassador using an Embassy flagpole to fly a gay rights Rainbow flag, a Save the Whale flag or any other trendy private ‘campaign’ symbol will be sacked […]
Remember the playful mermaids and mermen from HM Embassy in Warsaw? The Independent reports that some of them have got into trouble at the posh Beaver Club over at the Canadian Embassy: Quite what took place in the embassy – a three-storey modernist construction in French limestone and aluminium which won […]
Mr Eugenides hosts. Including a smart analysis of why Manchester United lost out to Chelsea this year. And a fine link to this timeless helpful advice, said to come from Martin Luther: If the wife will not, nor can performe the due of marriadge, let the chamber-mayde come, and stepp […]
And here I am debuting at Conservative Home, on the always fascinating subject of the many ways in which Labour damaged the FCO. A further piece tomorrow looks at what William Hague needs to do to start to put things right.
Here is my long interview (in English) with George Matlock over at Radio Orla, a successful London-based radio station with a strong Polish angle. I normally can’t bear to watch or listen to myself after doing such media slots. But I started to listen to this one – I found it […]
John Redwood MP puts it tersely: Its first task, as stern budget superviser urging member states to rein in deficits, should be to make dramatic reductions in the EU budget. From each member states point of view the money spent on EU matters and projects is of more marginal importance […]
Via the beady-eyed Browser, a fascinating piece over at Marginal Revolution about the way small errors in calculating debt risks can have cascading systemic bad consequences down the road: Suppose that we misspecified the underlying probability of mortgage default and we later discover the true probability is not .05 but .06. […]
As readers will have noticed, someone describing himself/herself as George Dutton is now following this site closely and commenting with oh-so-clever remarks celebrating Socialism. He quotes from a remarkable essay by Albert Einstein on Why Socialism? from 1949. Here is Albert fretting over the survival of the human race (as well […]
At what point does ‘anecdotal’ evidence of the results of any given policy start to look like reality? He had made the point that if he was some £800 per month worse off because of Labour’s 50% tax band, he would have to cut some current personal ‘discretionary’ expenditure to […]
Fine posting by Tim Worstall, looking behind the headline numbers to see what is really going on with EU sugar subsidies: The person handing over the cheque isn’t, necessarily, the person carrying the economic burden of the tax. This can also be true of subsidies: the person cashing the cheque […]
