Gaza: humanitarian pause or ceasefire?
17 November, 2023. A humanitarian pause is the answer. Here's why.
November 22, 2023
August 10, 2023
China’s embassy in Ukraine
10 August 2023 Considerable attention has been focused on China’s participation in the Saudi-hosted talks at national security adviser level on Ukraine in Jedda over the weekend 5-6 August 2023, while Russia was not invited.
July 23, 2023
‘Agri-food-and drink attachés’ for endangered seats
23 July 2023 The crisply styled Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has rediscovered and, in the modern way of things, rebranded the agricultural attaché. First installed in diplomatic missions after the First World War, not least those of the United States, this officer has re-appeared in some British missions abroad [...]
Email crash
20 July 2023 My old Virgin Media email account has crashed yet again, so - like many others - I have given up on it. Anyone wishing to reach me who has not received a change of address message can do so via the CONTACT form, at the right-hand end of the top horizontal [...]
Fleetwood Mac, ‘Perfect’ surprise
12 July 2023 About a week ago my friend and close neighbour, John Sandford-Smith, turned up at my door. In one hand he held a large tool I had lent him some time ago (he had forgotten I had told him I no longer needed it) and in the other [...]
February 15, 2023
New START Treaty on embassy life support
February 15 2023 It is a defining feature of the permanent embassy that – in contrast to the special mission – it has general responsibilities, and these might cover almost any subject. Although I’m guessing, a recent and extremely important case in point appears to be the role of the [...]
November 29, 2022
Corrupt honorary consuls exposed
28 November 2022 It has long been suspected that governments riddled with corruption have allowed this reflex to extend – for a fee – to appointing rogues of all sorts to represent them as ‘honorary consuls’ in foreign states that permit them, as the vast majority do.
March 3, 2022
How your country voted in UN debates on Ukraine
3 March 2022 Check how your country voted in the UN debates on Ukraine in the last few days, or found that, regrettably, its permanant representative had pressing engagements elsewhere and failed to vote altogether.
January 29, 2022
Boris Johnson: Tottering Tsar of Londongrad
29 January 2022 Why has Boris Johnson always winked at the huge amount of dirty Russian money pouring into London while publicly parading his anti-Putin views?
October 11, 2021
America’s headless embassies
11 October 2021 Astonishing to report, almost nine months since the inauguration of US President Joe Biden in January, a huge number of ambassadorial positions at US embassies and key bodies such as NATO, the EU, and the OECD, as well as senior positions in the Department of State, remain unfilled. Why has this happened [...]
July 30, 2021
Secrecy in negotiations, UK-style
30 July, 2021 To what lengths is the UK going to shroud in secrecy its post-Brexit free trade negotiations?
June 26, 2021
‘Buy, buy (not bye-bye) Mr Ambassador!’
26 June, 2021 In a blog dated 16 June 2021, Dominic Cummings, until recently British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top adviser but now his most trenchant critic, let slip a morsel of information of considerable interest to students of diplomacy.
May 25, 2021
Embassies and transnational repression
25 May, 2021 If the vicious authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, now a Russian puppet state in eastern Europe, will force down an EU civil airliner in order to seize, imprison and torture an opposition journalist, it seems to me that we are entitled to ask: To what lengths will this and any [...]
Boris Johnson: the charge sheet
1 May 2021 I’ve blogged very little of late, being taken up with spring gardening jobs and wrapping up a new book but I am forced back to it by the need to sound off yet again about that ‘greased piglet’, Boris Johnson, who still seems able to get away with murder – or at [...]
January 1, 2021
‘Brexit: a tragic national error’
1 January, 2021 Thus the headline on The Guardian’s eloquent editorial today, New Year’s Day 2021, the day on which the UK starts life outside the European Union. I have nothing to add to it – except be sure to click on the link ‘led by journalists’ (hell, there it is, I've provided it myself) [...]
December 11, 2020
Boris Johnson takes UK down
11 December, 2020 Brexit head-banger in chief, first liar of the United Kingdom, and second-rate comedian, Boris Johnson, is primed to lead the UK, with sickening relish and grinning the while, into the abyss.
November 5, 2020
Obituary: Ambassador Laurence Pope
5 November 2020 The American scholar-diplomat, Laurence E. Pope, died on 31 October 2020.
September 12, 2020
Johnson’s Britain and the price of breaking international law
12 September 2020 The moral and political decay of Boris Johnson’s government has now marked a new low. It has been forced to admit publicly that it is willing to break an important international agreement signed and ratified less than a year earlier. The price of this is already significant and, unless it is stopped, [...]
Hostile takeover: Foreign Office swallows Development ministry
2 September 2020 First it was the Foreign Office (FO), then it evolved into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and today it becomes – as foreshadowed by Boris Johnson on 16 June – Britain’s ‘super-department for international affairs’, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Was this a good idea?
July 29, 2020
American diplomacy in crisis
29 July 2020 Over the last three and a half years the Trump White House has steadily inflicted serious damage on the US Department of State.