Another tiresome night in hospital (at least until 0330 or so) getting treatment for a horrible cough. I had a saline nebulisation which seems to amount to spraying my nose with misty sea water. Rather bracing. Feeling better now. Off tomorrow to the 2011 UK Speechwriters Guild conference in Bournemouth on […]
Last week in the Krynica Economic Forum in deep Poland, a highlight was the exchange between former German President (and former IMF Director) Horst Köhler and Polish Finance Minister Jan Vincent-Rostowski. In essence, Kohler argued that the time had come to stop throwing good money after bad in the Eurozone – […]
There were 249 reported terrorist attacks in EU member states in 2010. Quite a lot. Who carried them out? Not who you might think (my emphasis): Islamist terrorists carried out three attacks on EU territory. Separatist groups, on the other hand, were responsible for 160 attacks, while left-wing and anarchist groups […]
Peggy Noonan (who wrote speches for Ronald Reagan and knows a thing or two about communicating profound ideas in clear words, in part by telling a story) gets today just right: And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs […]
My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up: The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced […]
Here at Project Syndicate is Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski: Ten years later, it is clear that the fanatics behind those attacks miscalculated in two central respects. They regarded Western democracies as weak – unwilling or unable to respond to their evil extremism. And they expected Muslim communities and countries […]
I returned to the Embassy in Belgrade to be told to watch on TV what was happening in New York. I did. The Twin Towers crashed. My thought then is still valid: This level of Islamist madness is quite different. It can’t be defeated by normal means. Only moderate Muslims […]
Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes: there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: […]
Is here. It looks at The Secret History of Democracy by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). And finds it more tendentious than enlightening. Basically, straining to demonstrate that the ‘Western narrative'( sic) of democracy is seriously incomplete, the editors define democracy in a dumbed-down prim post-modern way which […]
The Crawf PC is going off for repairs. And the Crawfs are going to Cornwall for a week. Normal service should reappear in early September. Thanks
