My creative juices are at a low ebb these days. It must be Global Warming. Hence the feeble presence here and indeed everywhere else apart from off forays on to Twitter. Anyway, I am off to Budapest today to give a presentation on Eavesdropping and Diplomacy. The gift that keeps […]
A Polish friend draws my attention to this speech by FCO Minister of State David Lidington. It’s all about the European Union, delivered to a senior French audience earlier this week. Read the whole thing. To me as a speechwriting technician there’s something oddly ‘thin’ about it. It ticks the […]
Reader Nigel Sedgwick reminds me of his long insightful comment here back in mid-2011 on the subject of where or not to draw the line when it comes to state eavesdropping. I reproduce the whole comment here. See especially his concluding thoughts (my emphasis) An understanding of the current issue […]
In case you missed it, and I have done my best to miss it, there has been a puny but noisy row in the UK media over a piece in the Daily Mail that pointed out that Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph Miliband, was a communist whose ideas – has they […]
Dear All, Sorry to have dropped from the Blogosphere. Too much going on in the world and in the Crawf household, and not enough to say. I had an interesting few days giving a Negotiation Skills masterclass at the IAEA in Vienna, then a shorter one-day version of the same […]
It’s hard to work out what exactly Iran’s President Rouhani said in the USA about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions (or not) and/or the Holocaust. We Brits see these events through the filter of our media bias. Luckily we have Press TV to explain what is happening: Although the reports of […]
This is a grim article to read, showing as it does how the more exotic parts of modern feminism have plunged deep into the worst sorts of coercion and stupid thought control that echo what goes on in North Korea. Thus on one Canadian university campus – a space supposedly […]
I have been waiting to upgrade from my iPhone 4S to something notably better. That moment arrives with the appearance of the iPhone 5S and its fancy new operating system and fingerprint technology. It turns out that I can trade in my two-year old iPhone 4S for £175 or so, […]
Back again folks. Sorry about the break. I somehow keep getting distracted. Last week I gave a masterclass in Public Speaking to Gov Know. The results were, if I say so myself, spectacular. Two participants started the day with a pre-prepared short presentation, then finished the proceedings by doing their […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT is out. It recalls in some detail my happy time in the Foreign Office dealing with the end of the USSR and then the Russian transition from communism: I was posted to Moscow as Political Councillor in 1993. We watched this giant country start to […]
