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 [...]
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.
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.
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.
27 March 2017 Don’t you get fed up with the over-use of certain words and phrases?
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
7 March 2017 Once more the House of Lords, the ‘upper’ chamber of the British Parliament, has shown itself to be on the side of common decency, not to mention economic prudence.
5 March 2017 So Boris Johnson, Britain’s diplomatically inept, part-time foreign secretary (his other job is entertainment) is going to Moscow for talks with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
5 March 2017 UN-led prenegotiations for a settlement of the Syrian civil war tragically seem once more to be going nowhere.
10 February 2017 While studying documents on the ‘treaty of friendship’ signed between the State Department and the CIA in 1977, I came across a particularly interesting memo.
31 January 2017 Radical changes of government have in the past often led to tension between the new regime and at least some of the state’s diplomatic servants at foreign posts,
