Last week I was attempting to train some EU officials in the art of writing impactful political reports. My theory always was that if one’s work from Post was to be actually read by someone somewhere ploughing dispiritedly through the mass of dull stuff on an official desk or in an official […]
This BBC website story burbles on about a car that runs on compressed air. But it doesn’t. It runs on the power used to compress the air. So to say that the car produces ‘zero emissions’ is silly. The emissions are just produced by a power station of some sort up […]
Not long before the Dayton Peace Conference negotiations started in November 1995, the Contact Group met in Moscow to discuss how it all should go. The European members of the Contact Group decided to have an informal consultation before we met the Americans and then had the full Group meeting […]
Back in 1979 when I joined the Service the FCO effectively enjoyed a brilliant and droll monopoly over most of Whitehall for communicating quickly with foreign governments. If eg the Trade Department wanted to send a message to its opposite numbers in Japan, this is roughly what would happen: […]
The modern FCO like other British government departments is awash with ever-changing objectives/targets/priorities/strategies/goals, or whatever new jargon word they plan to seize on. In some deep sense a Plot has been Lost – such protean schemes show a striking inability to cope systematically with reality. Regardless of what the latest dizzy […]
One of the great words of our time is the Balkan/Turkish word ‘inat’. Most ‘Western’ diplomats and politicians dealing with the Balkans of course have never heard of it, even though those who know the region well regularly remind us of the force of inat Serb-style. Thus here. And here. […]
After returning from Zagreb I hit the Eurostar to Brussels to join for the first time as a trainer a good CPDS training course aimed at improving the quality of political reporting and analysis produced by EU officials. In one exercise the participants had to draft an urgent short report about the implications of […]
Back to sunny Zagreb last week for the first time in some years. I was there to represent ADR Group at the start of a new good EU-funded scheme to help spread modern Mediation practice and procedures in Croatia. Croatia like many former Communist countries has vast traffic-jams in its […]
Boris Tadic has won Serbia’s Presidential elections, defeating the populist Radical Tomislav Nikolic by a close but clear margin on a high turn-out. Nikolic has conceded defeat in a dignified way. Tadic is making suitably polite noises about his opponent and his supporters. This is a powerful vote by Serbia […]
In Warsaw in 2006 I found my way to a Kraftwerk concert, complete with their hit The Man-Machine. When growing up I somehow missed out completely on the elusive Kraftwerk’s musical impact. The show was both artistically and philosophically fascinating. One highlight was observing one of the robotic (behold that […]
