It turns out that there is a healthy market out there for me whispering into your ears. In that spirit, here is my podcast for the FCO describing how the Foreign Office operated in the years before World War One started. Many surprising facts in it about the tiny elite […]
Here is my piece at Telegraph Blogs looking at the resignation letter of Baroness Warsi who left the government today because of UK policy on Gaza: … our approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest and will have a […]
Spotted on Twitter. This one takes all available prizes for getting almost everything possible wrong in a short space, while yet displaying a non-trivial knowledge of English. The better your knowledge of a language, the better your mistakes? Maybe one day we’ll get Incontinent Ballistic Missiles. The next step in […]
A short sharp piece from former US top diplomat Christopher Hill on the problems besetting the borders of many Arab states: In a region where crises seem to be the norm, the Middle East’s latest cycle of violence suggests that something bigger is afoot: the beginning of the dissolution of […]
Non-diplomatic folk may not know the different levels of visit for national leaders. These include Private: the leader visits another country for a family holiday (and may or may not have an affable pre-arranged lunch or other meetings with that country’s leader while there). Then there is Official (or Working): a […]
As you know, I have sent off the first more or less full draft of my e-book Speechwriting for Leaders. There is much fruity stuff in this, if I say so myself. One of the points I make is that before writing a word the smart speechwriter needs to think […]
Check out the website of the lively new mediation partnership I am developing with Lori Pinkerton-Rolet: Mediation by Design. It has a blog where now and then we offer our thoughts on mediation in action. Such as this one, on the importance of scrutinising very closely (but ideally not too obviously) […]
My new piece for Telegraph Blogs looks at NATO’s preparedness (ie lack of) for a new assertive Russia: It is hard to imagine any situation in which Moscow decided that a full-scale military attack on central Europe would be a productive and winning idea. But what about something far more […]
Getting back to working on my e-book, Speechwriting for Leaders. Some of this is fruity and unexpected and highly operational stuff, if I say so myself. How about the current chapter on e-heckling: Some events make a virtue of the interactivity provided by IT. Screens round the walls of the […]
