14 June 2020 I am a keen gardener, and during the lockdown I had the great good fortune to be allowed by our neighbour to take over the care of her very large, tree-lined, and blissfully quiet garden. The weather was also unusually good, so I spent on average 6 hours a day working in [...]
12 June 2020 The future relationship negotiations between Britain and the EU, which commenced on 3 March 2020, teach many lessons in the art of negotiation. Among these are the obvious value of certain kinds of deadline and the less obvious value of publicly announcing ‘red lines’ before talks start. For present purposes I shall [...]
15 May, 2020 An influential article of 2014 noted that health attachés were appointed shortly after the Second World War and were thereafter assigned by ‘a growing number of countries … to work in embassies in countries of strategic importance.’ Is this true? If not, why not? And does it matter anyway?
14 March 2020 As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been announced that the second round of face-to-face talks on the UK’s new relationship with the EU, due to take place in London next week with the arrival of an EU delegation of over 100 trade experts, has been cancelled. Video-conferencing has been [...]
17 January 2020 Recent publicity about the hostile reaction in South Korea to Harry Harris, appointed as US ambassador at Seoul by Donald Trump in June 2018, serves to underline an important point:
8 January 2020 Probably not; or, if it does, only with further passages blacked out.
Eugenio Cusumano, Christopher Kinsey, eds. Diplomatic Security: A Comparative Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 280 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-0898-6. “Diplomatic security” is the term now usually preferred to “diplomatic protection” for the steps taken by states to safeguard the fabric of their diplomatic and consular missions, the lives of their diplomatic and consular [...]
7 December 2019 It was just a matter of time before a senior British diplomat got so sick of representing the UK government of Boris Johnson that she resigned.
Barder, Brian, Brian Barder’s Diplomatic Diary, ed. Louise Barder (privately published: London, 2019), pp. 307. Paperback ISBN 978-1-944066-29-1; hardback ISBN 978-1-944066-25-3. Available from Amazon, as well as other booksellers. Sir Brian Barder, the senior British diplomat and author of the always sage and sometimes gripping What Diplomats Do, died in 2017 but, courtesy of the [...]
2 November 2019 A report on Russian meddling in British democracy by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is being suppressed by the Johnson government.
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,
Mark Bertram, Room for Diplomacy: The history of Britain’s diplomatic buildings overseas, 1800-2000, 2nd ed. (Spire Books: Salisbury, 2017), pp. 479 incl. index, ISBN 978-1-904965-54-1 Mark Bertram joined the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works after reading architecture at Cambridge and remained in the civil service as architect, project manager, administrator, estate manager and – [...]
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.
