Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world: Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to […]
Even on Christmas Eve – or maybe especially on Christmas Eve – we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable. Here are some classic examples. Enough. Just go away. Except […]
Eurozone problem addict? It doesn’t get better than top US economist Martin Feldstein, who has the great advantage of having said right from the start that the project as conceived was unworkable if not dangerous. Here he is explaining in brisk terms what went wrong, before moving on to say what […]
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers. No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus […]
Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated. Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart. When the USSR broke up, […]
Hmm. Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend. A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of […]
To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that. Thus yesterday: We awoke this morning to various commentators […]
Not sure if I have linked here to my LSE book review about electronic voting, so here it is. Thus: The heart of the book is the authors’ emphasis on sensible risk analysis. Above all, they punch on the nose the odious “precautionary principle” – the superficially appealing but in fact […]
My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December. I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to […]
Back in 1961 the FCO set up a new group of clever diplomats known as the Planning Staff. They were tasked to think up new policy thoughts which might not be welcome, or easy to handle. And earlier this week the FCO hosted a birthday party to mark 50 years […]
