Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office’s posting policy. I think. Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all […]
A neat way to stump your friends is to ask them how many matches (no replays – penalties decide a drawn game) it takes to have a simple knock-out football competition between four teams with one side winning. "Er," they say, "surely three: two semi-finals get two teams into the […]
Climate Change. Is it happening? If it is happening is it because of humans? If so, is it all bad? And if it is all bad (or mainly bad), how to work out what we do can and wisely should do about it? What timescale counts? In my Civil Service […]
The success of Tomislav Nikolic in the Serbia Presidential elections first round vote ahead of current President Boris Tadic is no surprise. Points worth bearing in mind: Serbia is not that big a place (some 10 million people including the Kosovo population). Some four million people voted. Nikolic came in […]
Civil servants of all shapes and sizes have their various dealings with the public. But rarely in this country are formal bureaucratic proceedings available to a wider public to observe. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube we can at least watch some of the remarkable exchanges between an avowedly conservative […]
The blog of Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the FCO website is an interesting attempt to make Ministers and the foreign policy process more accessible to the public. The tricky thing with such initiatives aimed at reflecting what busy senior people think is that busy people are busy. So keeping a blog […]
The Phaeton-like rise and fall of Bobby Fischer brings back memories of the Cold War. It is hard to describe the surge of utter dominance and confidence which lifted Fischer to his World Chess Championship victory over Boris Spassky in 1972. Imagine (if you can) Tottenham winning the Premiership […]
The greatest theme of our times? Big v Small. For most of the past hundred years or so Bigness was the thing. Technology was clunky and expensive, so it made market and operational sense to pool resources to buy it and manage it. Bigness made the notion of mass-scale ‘planning’ on both sides […]
In March 2007 it was drawn to my attention that the authors of a new book The Albanian Question – Reshaping the Balkans had said some most disobliging things about … me! Thus I had been described as “ … a fanatical Yugophile, who had been a member of […]
There are three problems in Diplomacy. What you think about a problem. What you should do about it. And what you can do about it. So what the British Government think about the continuing Russian official pressure on the British Council is clear enough. But some commentators are saying that […]
