What do British diplomats in Europe do all day? Here is a fine example of the Embassy in Warsaw taking an idea (in this case advancing the prospects for disabled people in Poland as part of an EU-wide move in this area), then finding senior Polish partners and moving things […]
Here is an eloquent, impassioned account of a first visit to Auschwitz. Not least the stunning bewildering realisation when you arrive at the site that the car-park in front of it is full of … tourist coaches. People in shorts with video cameras, chatting away, perhaps looking forward to moving […]
One of the UK’s top-rated blogs with the inevitably winning combination of a strong Northern Ireland focus plus Russia and eastern Europe is Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness. Have a look. The picture at the top of the front page is a masterpiece by Russian/Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin, The Volga […]
Dan Hannan has some gracious things to say about Senator Kennedy’s commitment to parliamentary process. Funnily enough, the torrent of material appearing on the BBC and elsewhere seems to have little if anything to say about the time Kennedy secretly talked to the KGB to try to thwart the election of Ronald […]
Let me describe to you my one and only only encounter with Bono, an influential figurehead who, says Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat, is “almost as important as governments” and (according to surveys!) “already more trusted”. It was on 21 December 1997, in Mostar. Mostar was one of the cities most wrecked by […]
Carne Ross sends a cheery comment on my posting about his article: that I am wrong! Re-read the article with a bit more care and you will see that I do not advocate the rise of the Bono’s and Soros’s, I simply recognise it. It is an unarguable truth, acknowledged […]
Last year I reviewed Jonah Goldberg’s fine best-selling book Liberal Fascism. Here and here. Two of my better efforts (I’d say), so have a look if you have not rummaged that far back in the blog. Jonah has had his own blog talking about the book and its many ideas. But […]
A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’. Very difficult to say, because it’s a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail. My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the […]
John Redwood and Denis MacShane have been debating the growing UK total contribution to the EU Budget. So let’s go back to how it was negotiated in 2005. Previous postings (in date order for ease of following the story) are: here here and here In a nutshell, the EU Budget had to grow as […]
Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat says that old-fashioned diplomacy has had its day: Conventional embassies and their ambassadors are equally ill-suited to today’s challenges. The European foreign service, whose embryonic form already exists in the Council Secretariat, is awaiting its first orders once the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified. Like […]
