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 […]