Once upon a time when a product required plastic safety glasses the instructions said so, and one used one’s intelligence to put them on one’s head: lenses to the front of one’s face, and the curvy bit in the middle astride one’s nose for extra comfort. No longer. Now we get […]
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 […]
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 […]
… about the Democratic nomination race in the USA. Hillary Clinton’s chances look to rely on bringing into the reckoning the Democrat delegates from Florida and Michigan, who for internal party reasons (as things stand) are excluded. Byron York nails it: Her demand was pooh-poohed in some circles of the commentariat, but […]
Our Ambassador in Zimbabwe Andrew Pocock has had a confrontation with the Mugabe regime when he and some senior diplomatic colleagues went to have a look at what is now happening in Zimbabwe beyond the capital. Thus the dilemma of diplomats in a country run by gangsters and heading for disaster. The […]
The Independent has bewailed the fact that so many UK voters think that environmental concern is merely an excuse to raise taxes and (shock!) that climate change is totally natural: the findings make depressing reading for green campaigners. If they are thus depressed, good. Take my boiler at home, a fine […]
My observations on Poland’s Diplomatic Ball were picked up by Bartosz Weglarczyk’s fine blog in Poland and have raised an eyebrow or two. (Note to non-Polish speakers: every time you see a Z in a Polish text, remember that it serves much the same function as an H in English. Thus cz […]
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 […]
Back from Poland, my first foray back there as a businessman – or, as they say in that part of the Europe even for one such – biznesmen. A linguistic quirk. Many Slavic nouns have a feminine form. So as well as appropriating the word biznesmen, many Slavs informally call a […]
As I return to Poland today I am reminded of a revealing episode back in (if I recall correctly) early 2006. The Polish Foreign Ministry announced that it planned to revive an earlier tradition of an annual ball in honour of the Diplomatic Community, with a ‘First Post-War Diplomatic Ball’ (ie […]
