Let me say at the beginning that I am not a fan of Keir Starmer’s administration. It has all too often been clumsy and muddled, and it needs a course in communication skills. However, it has understood and accepted one absolutely basic fact of contemporary British life that both the Conservatives and Reform UK refuse […]
…and quicker than most of us thought it would. Trump wants Greenland. And he is prepared to blackmail any country that stands in his way. Of course, the claim that the USA needs Greenland for national security is nonsense. Under the 1951 Greenland Defence Treaty – which allowed the USA to have its base at […]
It was Carl von Clausewitz, the early nineteenth century Prussian general, who said: “War is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means”. In other words, if a country goes to war, it should do so with a clear political objective, and the war itself should be fought in such a manner as to […]
The BBC may well need structural reform. It is too big and too unwieldy for one man like Tim Davie to control. But that has nothing to do with the current faked-up crisis over Panorama’s reporting of a speech by Donald Trump. Editing has a purpose. And all editing changes an original. It reduces the […]
Like everyone else, I have been watching and waiting to see what Donald Trump will do next. I have been shocked at his apparently soft approach to Russia and hostility towards Ukraine. I have been amazed at his absurd demands to annex Greenland and make Canada the fifty-first state. I have been appalled and staggered […]
Just over ten years ago, I wrote a biography of the British diplomat and writer, Harold Nicolson. Nicolson was an acknowledged expert on the theory and practice of diplomacy. In his 1939 study of the subject, called simply ‘Diplomacy’, he wrote: “The dangers of vanity in a negotiator can scarcely be exaggerated. It tempts him […]
I am getting increasingly fed up with hearing ‘Let us not forget that this is the Prime Minister who has consistently got the big calls right’. This particular quote comes from the Daily Express of June 7, 2022, but it originated in a speech by Johnson himself and has been parroted by Tory MPs, party […]
As a former diplomat and civil servant, I tend to distrust the media when complex things like the Northern Ireland protocol are concerned. So, since returning from France – where I heard a lot of views on Brexit and its consequences from people as diverse as market traders, hoteliers, long term British residents and random […]