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24 October 2019 A recent development in Brexit has provided interesting evidence of the role of ambassadors in clarifying their governments’ intentions, however contradictory they might be.

4 October 2019 The British government has at virtually the last minute submitted to the EU a detailed proposal on a new withdrawal agreement

27 September 2019 For those of us who study embassies, consulates and foreign ministries it is easy to forget that they could not work well, if at all, without ‘support staff’.

24 September 2019 Today 11 justices of the UK Supreme Court unanimously declared the non-prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, to have unlawfully advised the Queen to suspend Parliament

23 September 2019 On 19 September three ‘non-papers’ on the Irish backstop were submitted to the EU by the non-prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson,

4 September 2019 lie, lie and lie again. This is the maxim that, as usual, guided Boris Johnson’s behaviour in the House of Commons last night.

30 July 2019 Even were Johnson’s new Tory government to be serious about negotiating a new Brexit deal with the EU before 31 October – which anyone who cares to look can see it almost certainly isn’t – it would be a waste of the EU’s time.

12 July 2019 British foreign secretary and Tory leadership hopeful, Jeremy Hunt, yesterday told Foreign Office staff that ‘the UK government alone will determine appointments based on our national interest alone.’

9 July 2019 All observers know that what the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Kim Darroch, said about Donald Trump and his White House in secret, classified messages to the Foreign Office is true.

1 March 2019 It has long been suspected that Vladimir Putin’s government, in part via the agency of the Russian Embassy in London, gave covert support to the campaign that secured the narrow victory for the Brexiters in the June 2016 referendum in the UK.

14 February 2019 It’s always been blindingly obvious but it needed saying again, and has just been succinctly stated once more by more than 40 former, senior British ambassadors and high commissioners in a letter to Theresa May,

10 December 2018 Answer: The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Why?

2 December 2018 Like many others, I heaved a sigh of relief when I learned that Matthew Hedges had been pardoned and allowed to return home.

24 November 2018 Predictably enough, the hard right-wing nationalists in Parliament are pounding their chests and claiming that Theresa May’s government could have got a much better deal on Brexit.

18 October 2018 Some points of law concerning this sickening and profoundly worrying case need clearing up.

11 August 2018 This is the new title under which DiploFoundation has re-launched my biography of E. C. Grenville-Murray on the ISSUU platform.

13 June 2018 Out of sheer despair, I have been silent for a long time on Trump’s new style of ‘diplomacy’, as well as on the dangerous clowning of Boris Johnson at Britain’s Foreign Office.

5 April 2018 There is not a great deal I can add to what has already been written about this sorry business but, since I am working on a related project, it has pricked my interest.

27 November 2017 John Stuart Mill called the nineteenth century Tory Party in England the ‘stupidest’ party but he would probably not have hesitated for long in abandoning this relativistic statement as too charitable to its modern, Brextremist variant.

12 November 2017 I record here, belatedly, the death in September of my friend, Sir Brian Barder, former British diplomat and author of one of the best books on diplomacy. There were very good obituaries of him in the British press and to these I added a lengthy personal footnote on the University of [...]