In the UK most political letters announcing the writer’s resignation say what they have to say, perhaps with a feigned or even real sentence or two of respect, then stop. Some go into some vital policy detail, albeit in thinly coded and very general terms. See Geoffrey Howe’s letter to Margaret […]
I always enjoy ruining films being watched by my children by calling out product placement every time the camera lovingly dwells on a can of Pepsi or a specific range of car or a new Sony gizmo. The new James Bond films are almost unwatchable now, such is this junk. […]
Did PM Putin deliberately sit President Obama in a chair way too low, to make him look and feel awkward for the TV cameras? The great debate unfolds. The point of such sly diplomatic insults is that the victim dare not show that s/he is aware of them, even if […]
Is here. It is better than his Cairo speech which had rather too many philosophically incoherent passages. This one is easier to make, of course, as he is aiming it at one country in particular and not at an amorphous ‘Muslim world’. So the key messages can be more finely […]
Should a civil servant be sacked for posting a disobliging comment about a Minister on a website anonymously, using an official computer to do so? Iain Dale has the link. He asks: Does this strike you as being a bit over the top? What it implies is that there is […]
Here is a tricky one which I heard about recently. You are a senior civil servant preparing a confidential paper for Ministers on your experiences on the ground in an intervention hot-spot. You list various recommendations for the way forward. But your main concern is that the British troops and […]
Reader Willie Garvin has sent in several thoughtful contributions in response to my request for personal experiences of donor/military cooperation (or not) on the ground in different hotspots. His basic point is that Western ‘interventions’ in conflict-ridden or fragile states are doomed to fail because the underlying objectives are invariably […]
Once again the Guardian talking sense, this time on the Sir John Sawers’ untimely Facebook story: … the revelations of Lady Shelley surely contain very little that those in search of such information could not find somewhere else in the course of an afternoon. And certainly there seems to be […]
As our friend Ivor wrote: On one side, the United Nations, the OAS, the United States government and, apparently, most informed opinion worldwide. Lined up against them, someone who spent 12 months as Honduran Minister of Culture – a political big-hitter, quite clearly – and your good self. It promises to […]
Is hosted by Mr Eugenides, holding back his rage (or not). Here is one link to another pseudoynmous blogger: an English magistrate giving us insights on the law in practice. And there are some gruesome things happening in Norwich… And Unmitigated England rebukes Sir Paul and pigs out, as it were, on […]
