Round at the FCO yesterday I had a chat with some people who know what they are talking about on the increasingly strange case of Julian Assange and the Ecuador Embassy. It turns out that the costs of keeping a close eye on him continue to rise, although of course […]
At the risk of boring you all to death, I link to my new Telegraph Blogs piece on #Assange. Many excellent and pertinent comments: Penned by a gutless burocrat who spent his entire worthless career cowering inside a British Embassy, knowing that no matter what garbage he wrote, he was […]
The Assange case is stuck and embarrassing. How might one look at this issue as a professional mediator? As things stand, the interests of Assange/Ecuador and UK/Sweden respectively largely coincide. Assange/Ecuador want to use the issue to bolster their reputations and poke the US/West in the eye. UK/Sweden want to […]
Here at The Corner (National Review Online’s popular stream of consciousness in the USA) is a piece by John O’Sullivan that picks up some of my ideas but comes down in favour of gracefully letting Mr Assange stew in his Ecuadorean juice: With those two points in mind, why not try […]
In a comment on my earlier post, my old sparring partner and inveterate contrarian Brian Barder takes up the challenge re diplomatic immunity and Assange: Entertaining knockabout, Charles, but completely wrong. The embassy’s premises are unequivocally immune from entry without the agreement of the ambassador, under international law as laid down […]
With Ecuador set to make an announcement later today about Julian Assange and his bid for asylum (he currently is skulking in their Embassy in London) the BBC World Service have just interviewed me for some background on the way bids for ‘asylum’ in Embassies work in practice. I drew on my […]
Having gone through a full cheery diplomatic career without having read the Vienna Convention, I thought that I would see if J Assange might be popp’d in an Ecuadoran Diplomatic Bag and removed from the UK that way. In other words, can he be ‘smuggled’ out in broad sight or […]
Wikileaker Julian Assange has been answering ‘live’ e-questions via the Guardian. Here he simply runs away from a serious if long question which. by the way, is not from me: I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against […]
My piece at DIPLOMAT magazine on the trials and tribulations of organising diplomatic visits appears. Thus: Visits come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they’re largely symbolic– a senior gesture to show that the bilateral relationship is warm and alive, but not much more than that. Sometimes there’s serious diplomatic business […]
Back in January last year I opined on the negotiation psychology of spy expulsions: It’s of course possible that as part of its New Psychological Approach, Moscow chooses deliberately to work out what everyone expects then not do that. Think about it. You cause the other side to think hard about […]
