Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008? I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing […]
Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair’s Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency: "… the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force" Almost anything said by the Western world’s […]
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia’s answer to the BBC’s world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular. As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the […]
Last week I attended the annual FCO remembrance ceremony held in November each year to honour FCO diplomats and colleagues who have been killed while on duty. I try to attend each year, as my friend and colleague Charles Morpeth was killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia in 1997 […]
Readers here know all about MTS and non-MTS. It seemed a good idea to explain the idea to Telegraph Blog readers. Done here, with a nice stormy seas picture: Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured? One of the metaphors I deployed to explain Bosnia’s […]
In case readers here have missed it, my second Telegraph Blog contribution: Most people reading this website will have been brought up to believe that "liberal democracy" is a natural state of affairs. It trundles along in the background for the British public as for the Foreign Office, without needing […]
Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine. It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks: When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see […]
Most people are bewildered by what is going on in Greece. So am I. But here is a wily view from everyone’s favourite Serb Paleocon, Srdja Trifkovic, who explains how the whole manoeuvre looks like a quirky judo move to floor the opposition and so end up making the whole […]
We mere taxpayers suspect in our dark hearts that a formidable industry has grown up around the ‘climate change’ issue, with all sorts of organisations big and small depending on state handouts to survive, and so frothing up the climate issue regardless of the facts to make sure that those handouts […]
A feisty but realistic article in the Guardian by Nikos Dimitriou looks at Greece’s deep problems whatever happens: Greece relies on imports, fuel and food especially. The agricultural sector has dropped to less than 4% of GDP – can enough be grown to feed the population? How many more businesses […]
