Blog

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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.’ Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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, Read more.

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

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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 [...]

30 August 2017 On 22 August (2017) John Kerr published an article in the London Evening Standard that to all intents and purposes was a clear call for the dismissal of Boris Johnson as British foreign secretary. Read more.

19 July 2017 Even the most cautious headline – ‘previously undisclosed meeting’ – describing the informal conversation between the American and Russian leaders during the dinner for the G20 summiteers and their spouses in early July suggests that it was in some way extraordinary. Read more.

10 April 2017 The Trump administration quickly declared its view – almost certainly correct – that the Syrian air force was responsible for the chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in northern Syria early last week. Read more.

27 March 2017 Don’t you get fed up with the over-use of certain words and phrases? Read more.

17 March 2017 The US State Department used to be very good at keeping America’s own diplomatic correspondents abreast of foreign policy developments. It gave daily press briefings Read more.