Sir John Sawers has given a significant speech at King’s College London on the Limits of Security. Here is the ‘official’ website version. And here is my piece for Daily Telegraph Comment mentioning it with (as you can see) my disclaimer mentioning that I worked with Sir John on his speech, his first after […]
I’ve been busy writing this and that and getting ready for my next trip to Kazakhstan – leaving for the airport in an hour or so. This time it is give TWO courses in Speechwriting and Public Speaking. Kazakh oratory is set to explode! Check out my longer piece in […]
My latest Ukraine/Russia piece for Telegraph Comment today must have been good – it has smoked out an unusually nasty set of Russian trolls. Here it is: Negotiation is often presented as a choice between carrot and stick: what can one side do to affect the positive or negative incentives […]
Back from watching the world from the fascinating vantage-point of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that one of our Negotiation Skills specialist imaginary roleplays had been almost exactly what happened to OPCW inspectors at a tense suspected CW site in […]
+++ OMG! Stop the presses! +++ Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia! But wait? What does this mean? Some Saudis have Tweeted criticism, others praise. Elsewhere views similarly differ. Christine Odone in the Telegraph (paywalled these days): This gesture is being widely praised for sending a “bold […]
Here is my look at the speech at the 2005 Auschwitz commemoration by Vladimir Putin: I was there as British Ambassador to Poland, standing behind the rows of world leaders. It was dark and cold: a painful minus 8 degrees C. We lucky lesser VIPs at the back could move around […]
BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages: In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the […]
Just look at this. A Guardian report about a large and rather over-excited football banner brought into a Belgian football stadium: The banner which said Red or Dead referred to the Standard colours and also showed a drawing of a masked man with a knife and the head of Anderlecht […]
I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting. I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good: Moscow, 1997. […]
