Foreign Secretary William Hague is trying to sort out the FCO after years of studied neglect by Labour. Here is his recent speech which describes the problems quite well (albeit in general terms) and sets out a plan for putting things right. Especially encouraging is his emphasis on basic technique. […]
Spotted in an office block just off Edgware Road in central London this week. (Ooops – earlier spelling mistake corrected)
Looking at Stumbling and Mumbling’s personal blog profile I noticed this: What is your favourite poem? W.B Yeats’s Song of the Wandering Angus, as sung by Jolie Holland The lovely original poem is here, with Aengus not Angus in the title: … Though I am old with wandering Through […]
Articles pour out about the mounting problems in Greece. Homelessness, drugs, shops shutting, psychological despair, political alienation, emigration, suicide, and the rest. Such as this one in the Guardian: A new underclass has appeared: in the homeless and hungry who roam the streets; in the spiralling number of drug addicts; in […]
As the high tide of stupidity steadily moves up from lapping our ankles to dampening our weary groins, the latest example of irredeemable uselessness is … drumroll … Santander bank in nearby XXXXXX. We gave them an easy one. Upgrade our son’s existing Santander account to a Uni-level account with […]
A former FCO colleague gets in touch: I’ve always enjoyed your telegrams when you were in the FCO and your blog since. Best compliment I ever got from a boss in the FCO was that I was the second best on paper he had encountered, after you! The legend lives on.
I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing. A handy compilation of a few horrors: – Sneaky use of inverted comma qualification to […]
As you can see, I have succumbed to the need to try to earn some money from this blog and added a couple of advertising slots. I have written well over a million words here since 2007, which is a lot of time and effort to devote to a bemused […]
Update carried also at the Commentator * * * * * Here is Ed Miliband’s Labour Conference speech today – in full. A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from […]
Welcome readers from Steyn Online The Orwell Prize have put out a fascinating statement on the J Hari affair. The Council considered one article submitted by Hari in 2008, ‘How multiculturalism is betraying women’ (The Independent, 30 April 2007), on the basis of the evidence which had been received. […]
