Speech and Other Writing

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

Busy ploughing through Lonely Hearts by John Harvey.

The hero of this series of well praised detective stories is Detective Charlie Resnick. He has a Polish background which makes a lugubrious appearance now and again.

But if Arrow Books are going to do detective stories with a Polish angle, they ought to get Poles to help the proof-reading.

Imagine my shock and dismay to see on p 249 of the 2002 edition (corrected now?) the Polish national dish traduced by being turned into something with an Albanian flavour: they meant pierogi, but it appeared as pieroqi.

Resnick visits a Polish woman settled in the UK. There on the wall (p 251) is a picture of Cardinal Wysznski. Who or what is he? Can't they spell? They must be referring to Cardinal Wyszynski.

Come on, Arrow Books. These are all easy words.

Try Polish for beetle: chrzaszcz.

Then move on the infamous Polish tongue-twister:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie
I Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.

Which Wikipedia kindly helps one pronounce: 

[fʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨ.ɲε xʂɔɰ̃ʂʧ bʐmi ftʂtɕi.ɲε]
[i.ʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨn stε.gɔ swɨ.ɲε]

And means:

In the town of Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed
And Szczebrzeszyn is famous for it.

As it should be.

Remember the heroic fight for freedom by Ezra Levant in Canada over his publication of the dreaded Danish cartoons of Mohamed?

He has won!

Sort of.

He didn’t say I was free. He said I merely met his censorship standards, so I may go. Those are two completely different things.

Indeed.

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means keeping secrets secret, the public respecting limits on the public's 'right to know'. Lost lap-tops containing secret official material convey a sense of fathomless incompetence.

In return for ceding extra government discretion in this murky area, the public react badly to politicians whipping up public sentiment on the basis of inconclusive intelligence analysis, as happened in the run-up to the Iraq intervention. 

You know when you are seeing something Really Secret when its heading is a Greek letter or acronym you haven't seen before: TOP SECRET UK EYES A EPSILON/LOCKTIGHT or somesuch.

During my career I have seen all sorts of highly confidential analyses of controversial issues and countless Top Secret reports. I have written such papers myself.

Now I have left the FCO. Should I be free to use my privileged access to this fruity material to make money or stir up public anger, even if I happen to think the moral case is just?

In my view, no. Certainly not immediately I leave the Service, and for some purposes never.

The 'system' (and here I part company with Craig Murray) does offer all sorts of democratic best practice ways for officials to register substantive concerns, compatible with maintaining the secret methods needed to track foreign spies working against us, or managing threats posed by ruthless terrorist killers themselves armed with high-tech kit.

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

Risky business for politicians and the public alike, one way or the other? Yes.

All that noted, if we agree that I am not to be 'allowed' to use my knowledge of highly sensitive processes/facts as I like immediately on leaving the FCO, how to give effect to that?

And if there are Rules or Principles, how to apply them? What threat should hang over me to deter me, a former British diplomat pecking away at my lonely keyboard, from overstepping the rules, in letter or spirit?

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

Threats to my pension? Ah now you're talking!

Finally, who in the end decides if a line has been overstepped, and what should happen next?

The Public Affairs Committee made a strong point in noting that in Freedom of Information Act disputes a separate outside mechanism has been set up to stop a Ministry being judge and jury where its own information is concerned. Something like that could be used to settle in a gentlemanly way rows over contested memoirs of the Jeremy Greenstock sort?

Ministers! The smart way to lean is towards generosity, creativity and flexibility. Do not appear vindictive/obsessive/defensive.

Few if any 'revelations' by former civil servants do drastic irreparable damage. We are in fact quite loyal for most purposes, most of the time.

Much worse political damage can be done by appearing to cover up and duck the hard questions than by taking some hits, heavy and unfair as they may be at the time.

And, above all Ministers, behave in an honourable, trustworthy and fair-minded way towards your officials and the public alike.

This gives you your best chance of winning their respect and so surviving the inevitable squalls of democratic public life in good shape, maybe even with a reputation enhanced.

Light touch, old boy, light touch – always the safest policy.

The House of Commons Public Affairs Select Committee has now given its thoughts on the FCO/Cabinet Office rules - tightened after the Craig Murray and Sir Christopher Meyer books - on what diplomats can (or not) say after they leave the Service.

Their view:

 ... the results do indeed appear to be excessively wide-ranging and oppressive. Their only saving grace is that they seem to be unworkable.

A bit of a tonking?

I have dashed off some thoughts for the Independent's Open House pages. Here.

More to follow.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.

Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.

Was he writing the script for The Dark Knight?

Is B Obama losing momentum?

If so, is it because he did not take some earlier advice?

Buying things is a redistribution of wealth.

Wood?

Meet Axe.

The role (if any) played by former diplomats in public life depends to quite a degree on how - and how far - they draw on their extensive and unique experiences in the Diplomatic Service.

So, questions.

What are the limits if any on what they can say publicly about information/insights and sheer gossip gained from working for the taxpayer?

And who decides?

Following the noise generated by the memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer the Government looked again at the rules. And aimed to tighten them up.

My former colleague Sir Edward Clay has come out especially strongly against this move:

It remains to be seen whether future retirees will flout the FCO's legally dubious gag; the FCO clearly intends to hear progressively less from its retired and senior members, unless it approves of what is uttered. It suppresses valedictory despatches from retiring ambassadors, afraid of criticisms. There have been whispers of an attempt to get mandarins to sign over copyright on anything they write - novels and poetry, as well as despatches.

The FCO tells retirees that the rules applying to their serving colleagues also apply to them, for ever. Books, articles and lectures have got to be cleared months ahead. But the real rub comes with the requirement to give five days' notice of what they intend to say in any appearances on, or articles in, the media: any public comment based upon any of their professional experience is covered, far broader than previous strictures on official secrets or confidentiality. Unspecified civil or criminal proceedings are threatened for transgressors.

Sir Edward's and other vigorous interventions have prompted Parliament to take a look. The HoC Public Administration Select Committee is expected to pronounce today. A trailer.

In case you are wondering, before I left the FCO I told them that I was planning to write this Blog. I would use my judgement as to what I did or did not publish. I did not plan to seek publicity for myself via self-indulgent gossip or hot policy 'embarrassing revelations', mainly as I had none to reveal.

Rather I planned to talk about the diplomatic and political world in a quizzical, sometimes sharp way, to cast light on processes in public life and the professional dilemmas that arise.

Sounds good to us, they said.

Not a peep from them since.

Basically, the argument from some former Ambassadors is that they can not trust the Government to enforce these rules fairly.

Is not the problem that the Government these days can not trust senior civil servants to respect them?

Whence this decline in mutual trust?

A fish rots from the top.

Welcome, Britblog Roundup readers.

The latest Roundup is here. It links to one of my Craig Murray Saga posts: "long-term mud-wrestle ... one to watch."

Lots of other interesting blogs there too.

Such as the Stroppybird - someone about as far from my own views as I can imagine. It does one good to step outside one's own little world now and then.

An interesting pair of Ambassadorial letters to newspapers have appeared in recent days.

First, HM Ambassador in Poland Ric Todd wrote in July to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita about the death in a plane accident in 1943 in Gibraltar of General Sikorski.

Various Poles continue to insist that this death was suspicious, with one latest theory being that the conniving British persuaded some Poles to effect sabotage. Huge efforts have been made down the years to investigate this tragedy, but the fact that nothing suspicious is ever found makes those who have suspicions even more suspicious.

Ambassador Todd aims once again to put the record straight:

The facts are sad but simple. Plane travel was more dangerous then than it is now. People who travelled by air during the war took risks. General Sikorski was a brave man who took those risks to see his troops and died in a plane crash. The British Government has already released all documents in its archives relating to the circumstances of General Sikorski's death, including the report of the 1943 Royal Air Force Commission of Inquiry and 1969 Report of the investigation into the accident, carried out by the then Co-ordinator of Intelligence, Sir Dick White. 

 Nothing has been found in the Secret Intelligence files to link Kim Philby or anyone else with General Sikorski's death. There is nothing to indicate that his death was not accidental. All the documents are in the public domain and are accessible to all researchers in the National Archives in London. Following their declassification these documents have continually been open to the public.  Nothing is being withheld.

Separately the Polish Ambassador in London Barbara Tuge-Erecinska has written to the Times about an article about Poles in the UK by Giles Coren, which in his usual bruising style takes up the theme of Polish anti-semitism:

... I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.

That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore.

My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.

The Polish Ambassador replies:

... The issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified in his emotional text. During the Second World War Poland was the target of the Nazi Germany’s aggression, and the Poles themselves were treated as the race of sub-humans. Any sort of assistance given to Jews was punished by death. Such assistance required heroism, as it was not only one’s own life that was put at stake, but also the lives of one’s family. Still, it is the Poles that make up the most of those awarded Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.

I will not make detailed references to the remaining aggressive remarks on Poland, unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge. What I find most important is that the general public, as result of similar publications, should not lose an understanding of what the Holocaust was and who the perpetrators were.

In short, Nazi Germany decided to wipe out the whole nation. This was unprecedented in human history. Poland’s role in the tragedy of the Holocaust consists in the fact that the extermination of the Jewish people happened to take place on Polish territory. The author seems to have forgotten that Poles were not responsible for devising and perpetrating this hideous crime...

In each case sensible and dignified letters, giving the readers of the two newspapers concerned (and thereby in effect putting on the public record) a clear official view but with a personal touch.

The general professional issue for Ambassadors is this.

On any given day in the country where one is posted there will be all sorts of annoying, tendentious and even untrue/stupid things being said about one's own country. A few of them bubble up to a wide readership or otherwise gain some public prominence.

Even if there is no reason to think that these views are held or in any way supported by one's host government, the very fact that they circulate potentially affects the 'climate of opinion' in the bilateral relationship.

So, when to write something in response? And what to write?

No good answer.

Not writing has a cost. It may allow erroneous or malign opinions about one's own country to circulate indefinitely, perhaps in ever more lurid fashion.

But writing a letter for publication also has a cost. It somehow dignifies and gives weight to the views being expressed, maybe thereby drawing even more attention to them. And it invites all sorts of further weary sniping from people who have an axe to grind or who just want to poke back at Ambassadors.

The Polish Foreign Ministry has something of a policy to respond firmly every time anything appears in the foreign media implying that the Holocaust was a Polish invention (phrases like 'Polish death camps' prompt a fierce and often successful response).

The British FCO leaves it to an Ambassador's discretion when and how and if at all to respond to annoying local views on official British positions.

I wrote to various Bosnian/Serbian/Polish newspapers on different occasions. I suspect my letters made not a scrap of difference one way or the other.

In especially scandalous or ridiculous cases where material consistently wrong had been published by ostensibly serious papers to the point of suggesting a dishonest campaign against British positions, I went to meet the Editor to offer an official view as and when one was needed.

I used the line that of course they could write what they liked when it came to comment/interpretation, but could we at least try to agree to get the facts (eg of what a British Minister or I myself had actually said) accurate?

That worked in a sporadic way. But often the newspapers concerned just did not care.

All in all, writing an Ambassadorial letter to a newspaper is best done sparingly. But even if you know that it is unlikely to change many minds, you feel better after sending it.

Which is part of the story too.

Craig Murray responds to my previous post:

Charles,

You brush very lightly over the fact that you praised in the warmest terms at the time the telegrams you now rubbish - as did numerous other Ambassadors including Jeremy Greenstock who commended the to his New York morning meeting.  I think that your new-found Damascean conversion to rubbihing me on behalf of the Establishment needs a little fuller explanation for your readers.

I think the most important single point here is one of honesty.  Our policy was based on accepting as true an official narrative of both economic and political reform which was simply impossible to square with the objective facts on the ground.  That theme recurred again and again throughout the book.  I don't think intellectual dishonesty is ever the basis for good policy.

I can respect though not agree with an argument from realpolitik that says "Karimov is very bad but we need him" as you posit.  But that wasn't the argument, as you well know.  The line being peddled by the US and supported in Whitehall was "Karimov's really not that bad a guy - look at all these reforms".  It was the intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of it that I found so frustrating.

I did not mean to brush over my email of congratulations to Craig on one of his early E-grams, nor do I think I did so. Plus see also this from an earlier post in April:

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where 'the West' had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Nor am I 'rubbishing' him or his telegrams now.

Craig has made a lively new life after leaving the FCO trading heavily on his former Ambassadorial status and access to sensitive information and insights he acquired while on the public payroll.  Hence, and with the benefit of some hindsight now, fair questions.

What sort of example did/does Craig Murray set? What lessons does his complex case teach young diplomats starting their careers?

As an informed FCO insider, now ex-FCO outsider I have been analysing his own published account of his work as HMA Uzbekistan, looking methodically at the important policy and procedural issues it raised. This is as far as I know the first time this has been done in such detail.

I think - and I think I have been showing - that Craig's work in a senior civil service position overseas gives us a fertile if not unique combination of poor technique and judgement attached to high-octane personal commitment. With British public and political life in its current demoralised state, such an example is well worth a close look.

Craig's claim that I am have had a 'new-found Damascean conversion' to rubbishing him 'on behalf of the Establishment' is a good example of the Murray Law of the Excluded Middle:

• Crawford rubbishes me
• The Establishment rubbishes me
• Therefore Crawford is rubbishing me on behalf of the Establishment

Puny illogic, which as shall be demonstrated infects important parts of Craig's professional work and helps cause his downfall (or meteoric rise to glory/notoriety, depending on what one wants to call it).

And whereas I can be blamed for many things in my FCO career, being part of the Establishment is (as Craig knows) just not one of them.

Anyway, I'll be moving on to the substance of Craig's other points above as my analysis of the book unfolds.

If anyone is impatient for More in the meantime, have a look at another what Brian Barder - yet another former British Ambassador - had to say on all this back in 2006. Plenty of thoughtful points here and in the links.

There's still time to do so, either here or via Iain Dale's site.

But you do need to vote for 10 UK blogs, so get cracking. Plenty to choose from on the TP Blog Directory.

Guide to Political Blogs 2008-9: Vote for your Top Ten Blogs

This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that:

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected to follow.

The recommendation is one of several that the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee is expected to make in its long-awaited report on harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The Report itself is here. Its overwhelming focus is "the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation."

I have gone through the document. There is only one single reference to blogs/blogging:

This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously.

It's all about:

the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film ...  a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

I try not to think about such things. But note the writing: four weary adverbs already, bulging the text like cotton wool stuffed in to expand an unstrained M&S bra.

What about this:

A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

Ha.Grown-up women are all about pretending to be grown-up! I knew it.

But they're for sure brainy:

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk” ... What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Doesn't vampy black nail varnish avoid an unseemly and impious clash?

You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with.

Women together, and vacuous articles in the Times about women together. A load of nothing?

Iain Dale urges his vast army of fans to read Total Politics Issue 2 - and one article in particular.

Indeed.

One version is here.

Some speeches are good for what they say. Others for how they make people feel.

This speech said more or less nothing, but reads nicely now and no doubt sounded good on the day. Or maybe not?

This paragraph caught my eye:

This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century - in this city of all cities - we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

Hmm: every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday.

Feeble drafting. But what might it mean?

Some sort of dig at Russia, telling it to stop messing in the former Soviet Union? A plug for Chechnya?

A clarion-call to those who want to leave the EU, so that those who stay in it can forge a stronger/closer Union?

Support for the break-up of the UK (or Belgium, or Spain, or Bosnia)?

Even Bland Nothing sends a signal of sorts.

My new Total Politics piece is out, full of Helpful Tips about how a new Minister should start to run a government Department.

It's quick to register and you can then see it on the E-zine.

More in the pipeline for issues 3 and 4.

Nigel Short has a lively use of words, as well as a lively chess style.

See the detailed rulings on his use of the word 'dunderheads' to describe two senior chess officials.

Defamatory or 'mere vulgar abuse'?

Who said that chess is boring?

Crawford v Murray (if that is what it is) has reached the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary (alas not available on their website):

Mandarin puts knife into FO’s loose cannon

UNCIVIL war has broken out at the Foreign Office. Charles Crawford, the retired former ambassador to Warsaw, has broken ranks to express publicly for the first time what the FO really thinks of its errant ex-ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and his memoirs, Murder In Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of the War on Terror.

Most significantly Crawford, whose acerbic memos had a cult following in the FCO, contests the theory that Mur­ray’s career was a “brilliant” one, des­tined for great things before being derailed by his removal from the post for accusing the government in Tashkent of human rights abuses...

... A contemporary of Tony Blair’s at St John’s Oxford, Crawford is no stranger to stirring up a hornet’s nest — in 2005 one of his “blackly humorous” personal emails was leaked to The Sunday Times, revealing how much he hated EU budget negotiations and suggesting they would be better conducted by Mr Blair placing a large alarm clock on the table with a deal to be done by the time the bell rung.

While many in the FCO privately agree that Murray has “gone native” and lacks judgment they will be sur­prised by the vehemence of Crawford’s remarks. He is the most senior manda­rin so far to speak out so strongly against a former colleague who was highlighting human rights abuses ...

Droll headline. 

Just to point out that as neither CC nor CM are actually employed by the FCO any longer, it is a bit odd to say that "an uncivil war has broken out at the Foreign Office".

Nor have I in any way purported to proclaim that what I write is "what the FO really thinks" about Craig Murray and his story.

Insofar as the FO really thinks about this matter, I imagine views are mixed.

Some people may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror and liked his defiant stand, even if it ended in a mess.

Others may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror but thought his way of selling it was in purely professional terms unwise/bad and/or counter-productive.

Others may have disapproved of Craig's War on Terror views and thought his way of selling them was bad.

Others may not have cared one way or the other on the policy level, but been happy or unhappy about the way the business was handled in personnel terms.

The Ministers involved at the time maybe viewed the whole business differently from their officials.

And so on.

What I plan to do is to carry on looking at the book in detail on my website, since it gives a probably uniquely rich seam of 'raw honesty' illuminated by vivid examples of policy and operational dilemmas for the British diplomats involved, at home and at Post alike.

Thus the book raises convincingly many serious questions for practitioners and the public. It deserves what it has not had so far (I think), namely a critical practitioner's analysis of it.

So, on we go tomorrow.

I was a great fan of the Balkan 'yellow press' in all its exotic glory.

Presumably these strange papers and magazines have a non-trivial readership otherwise they would not be published in such profusion. So as Ambassador wanting to develop insight into the thinkings of society as a whole, I felt it well worth swinging through them now and again.

My favourite was Twilight Zone (Zona Sumraka). It looks to have become a bit more suburban of late, being reincarnated as Magic Zone. In Belgrade a few years ago it broke an amazing number of world scoops, which alas the planet heeded not.

Remember the terrifying Calcutta Monkey-Man? 

Twilight Zone discovered that NATO special forces had secretly kidnapped this evil creature and used latest DNA technology to clone it, before bringing it to Kosovo. But it had escaped and was feasting on Albanians! 

Not to forget the genetically mutated beetles created by NATO bombings of Serbia, poised to start breeding in your garden.

Or Tutankhamun's mysterious Ring of Power which caused havoc in the wrong hands. It had been discovered by a malign German scientist and brought to New York, prompting the 9/11 disaster, and after various detours causing earthquakes/plagues/floods was heading for ... Mitrovica!

Unambiguously excellent.

There is also a political yellow press, which hopes society stays cynical and stupid. These publications take a tit-bit of gossip from the editor's cousin working in the police and explode it out of all proportion: All politicians are corrupt! All diplomats are spies! Albanians are dangerous!

Yet these papers too are not without interest, and operate on many levels.

A current sophisticated example is Kurir - see this world scoop of a former Kostunica adviser meeting a former US Ambassador. Sinister indeed.

A further recent scoop is how the British and US intelligence services conspired together to plan to assassinate Serbian PM Kostunica in Sarajevo back in 2002. The evidence is the purported transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation in a Belgrade restaurant between two UK and US diplomats.

Come on, Kurir.

You know that when the waiters in these places change the dirty salt and pepper pots for clean ones, we diplomats always speak louder and more clearly into the new microphones and make up silly stories.

Kurir of course do know this, so they slip in some clever little signals to show the real experts that the whole thing is a spoof, like deliberately confusing 'Anthony' for 'Andrew' within the same sentence. Elegantly done.

OK, let's start reviewing Craig Murray's book Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (Mainstream Publishing, 2007 edition)

Where better than the covers?

Harold Pinter "salutes a man of integrity"

John Sweeney: "An amazing narrative, beautifully written..."

John Pilger: "A man of the highest principle"

Here is the Sweeney review. It gets off to a fine start, describing said John Pilger as a "moral pimple". Sweeney on Murray:

Brilliant, unorthodox, committed to championing the causes of the United Kingdom, free trade and human rights, Murray had served his country with aplomb in Poland, Ghana and in the Citadel in Whitehall.

Oddly he does not mention Craig Murray's now largely forgotten aplombless role in the Sandline Affair. The official House of Commons Report is not altogether flattering here, describing Murray's note of a crucial meeting as "grossly inadequate".

UPDATE:  Craig has pointed out to me that he did not write that note but rather approved the draft submitted by his colleague. True, but Craig had been the lead FCO personality at what turned out to have been a crucial meeting in the whole Sandline affair (see here Tim Spicer's version of that encounter), so in my opinion it was up to him to take the rap (if any) for the way it was recorded.

Sweeney presses on:

But the rising star sizzled up like an overdone sausage when he came up against the War on Terror. The fascination of Craig Murray's tale of his fall from grace at the hands of the Foreign Office is that he gives so much ammunition to his enemies ... it is the honesty with which Murray reports his predicament that is striking. I do not think that he holds anything back from the reader, and that makes his indictment of the Foreign Office mandarins and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw all the more compelling. He is an honest man, and that seems to have been his difficulty.

Well put.

Part of me has never been able to understand Appeasement, how the British Establishment could have bent so low. Having read Murray's story, I can now. Even so, it is a shocking read, to see how often the Foreign Office twisted facts and invented half-truths to do Murray down. Fascinatingly, no one outside bought a word of it.

Sweeney buys 100% of Murray's version. He concludes:

Some of the most fascinating bits of this book concern how Murray, the insider, used Foreign Office procedure against the FO itself.

But, in the end, he was forced out, and what Murray claims were the big lies - for example, that the British government opposes torture in intelligence-gathering - were able to settle down, no longer challenged from within ... But truth will out. Craig Murray is at pains - sometimes absurdly so - to demonstrate that he is no hero. But that doesn't stop him from being heroic, or his book from being a bloody good read.

Sweeney takes a view on the merits relying primarily on Craig's book. Fine - up to him.

What I object to is his bold claim that this book is "beautifully written".

Craig's writing fills to the brim the Bucket of Cliche at the Well of Lubricity, and quaffs deep.

Take Craig's own description of the recruitment of Kristina as his new locally engaged secretary, a key job:

The moment the first candidate walked through the door, she had the job. She had the most extraordinary classical beauty, a perfect face framed by long blonde hair ... Karen agreed she was the best candidate, which I found a very useful defence when Fiona first set eyes on Kristina.

(Professional Judgement Rating:  0/10. Sexist/patronising: the language used here calls into question the claim that the best available candidate was picked. Even a hint of this sort of thing in eg an appraisal on a colleague could trigger disciplinary action.)

Later Craig hosts a small but select - and important - dinner party for Simon Butt, a senior colleague from London sent to Tashkent to try to ascertain what is going on in both Uzbekistan and the Embassy. A mess ensues when several key business contacts do not show on the night.

Craig's wife Fiona afterwards lays it on the line: "It's that bloody Kristina. She's useless."

Craig next day confronts Kristina.

And here, reader, steel yourself.

What follows is without any doubt the very worst passage ever written in any language by someone with diplomatic training:

 ... Kristina standing by the back of the car in a thick white jumper with a large roll-up neck that framed her face. I was struck anew by just how exquisite her beauty was, how classical. As she said 'Good morning', a little cloud of vapour sprang from her mouth and hung in the cold air. I thought how pleasant it would be to thrust forward my face and be enveloped in the little warm mist of that pretty exhalation.

Sadly, there was no escaping the need to discuss the previous night's dinner-guest debacle...

Aaaargh.

'Sadly'?!

Kristina fesses up. She 'just guessed' whether the guests would be turning up!

Craig says that he has to give her a written warning.

Kristina looked utterly crestfallen. I squeezed her hand ... Silence hung between us for a while. Some tendon in the strong relationship between us had been cut and would take a little time to heal.

(Professional Judgement Rating: 2/10. Sort of the right response to this bewildering stupidity by Kristina for her unacceptable performance in bungling what she knew was a key event for the Embassy and for Craig personally, ie a formal written warning. But again sexist/patronising and operationally questionable - would he have treated an incompetent male colleague in the same way?)

So much for the cover.

Next stop: the Preface.

So, our Prime Minister sees himself as some sort of Heathcliff fellow, from Wuthering Heights?

Back during the 2005 EU Budget negotiations rumours swirled to the effect that the Blair No 10 team affectionately referred to the then Chancellor as "Mrs Rochester" (ie the mad woman in the attic) from Jane Eyre, so passionate were his cries about the emerging EU deal.

Who would have thought that such literary insight is still so much alive in this country's bureaucracy?

Back from Brussels to an email from former colleague FCO Craig Murray:

Your blog has been discussing me rather a lot lately.  May I very politely suggest that you really might look at the book if you are going to give quite such detailed views?  It is, of course, only my version of events, but it is an honest one as I saw events. 

In a neat example of government 'spin' in action, David Miliband's speech today about Europe is being trailed in this morning's Guardian.

Once upon a time it was a good enough result to get the speech reported after it had happened. That being unreliable, Labour have taken to a high art the reporting of a speech before it happens.

By giving one or other outlet an 'exclusive' to some of the pre-speech substance they secure positive coverage largely on the government's own terms and, if all goes well, they may get further coverage after the speech takes place.

Two headlines for the price of one!

It of course takes a servile and idle media environment to pull this one off, time after time. But we have one, so that's OK.

The likely speech? Miliband will praise the French for saying they are willing to reintegrate into Nato's command structure, and will insist that a stronger European defence policy does not mean Nato stops being the cornerstone of European defence.

But he will add: "As the Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated, unless Europe can develop its own capabilities, it will be consigned always to wait impotently until the US and Nato are ready and able to intervene.

Huh? The Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated no such thing. The best available European capabilities (ie British and French) were deployed in large and flexible numbers. It was the political dithering in Washington and other capitals including ours that created so many problems. 

In any case, ever since PM Blair and President Chirac launched European Defence back in 1998, the deep problem has been that Europe wants to avoid paying for it.

Even better, pay even less. And so the gap between collective EU defence spending and US spending grows and grows.

So instead of dwelling on that failure of their own leadership and looking hard at Priorities, EU leaders prefer to fiddle with the structures.

More structure = less flexibility. By creating more 'European' defence we effectively give a greater say over our possible deployments to all those countries who contribute very little but have huge opinions on everything.

Will we hear one day an honest speech from a Foreign Secretary looking at substance not spin and saying something about that?

The problem with making speeches is that quite a lot of things have been said before.

So do you strive to say something new?

Or do you 'borrow' ideas from others..?

The communist parts of the world recycled all sorts of jokes. See a few here, as nicely reviewed here.

Some of them maybe emerged elsewhere back in the mists of time and were rebooted for new purposes.

Thus:

"A Russian proverb: If you see a Bulgarian in the street, beat him. He'll know why!"

When I shared that with someone in Poland he said he'd heard it long before in the Middle East, but with the words "your wife" replacing "a Bulgarian".

Or this one:

A Pole, a Nigerian and a Russian are standing outside the hospital ward where their respective wives have just had their respective babies.

Out comes an agitated nurse. "There's been a mix-up. We don't know which baby belongs to whom!"

The Pole says that he will sort things out and enters the ward. He reappears with a strikingly dark-skinned African-looking baby.

"The Nigerian coughs politely. "Excuse me, but perhaps that one is mine?"

Pole: "Look, there's a Russian in there and I'm taking no chances!"

That one is found on the Internet in numerous ethnic and other forms. It is a fine one to use to unnerve clever people from Harvard.

They laugh nervously, shocked at its apparent racially charged political incorrectitude but unable to work out why it is offensive and to whom.

Back on languages again.

Slav languages make a distinction in their verbs between Perfective and Imperfective 'aspects'. Thus in Russian/Serbian/Polish there are different verb forms denoting (a) when an action has been done and is now complete, and (b) when an action is continuing or repeated.

Here is a fairly straightforward explanation of the basic point.

We too express these distinctions in English, in a different form:

• Perfective:     Yesterday I ate my sandwiches
• Imperfective:  Yesterday when I was eating my sandwiches, it happened...

And we also use prepositions (often 'up') to denote the idea of finishing an action: "Please eat up your lunch"; "chop up those onions"; "carry out a task"...

The use of these prepositions in English has a colloquial ring. Is there some element of linguistic class distinction here too?

Would an Upper Class person say "I'll ring you up", rather than "I'll telephone you"? Do Upper Class people where possible use a single word correctly to express an idea rather than these prepositional verb-phrases?

Thus "Finish your lunch", "chop the onions" and "complete a task". 

Or is it all just a matter of ultra-correct and/or old-fashioned usage which (probably) is dying out?  

At an FCO Leadership event in 2006, a presentation on Globalisation argued that we were now beholding one of the most momentous changes in human history roll out before our very eyes: the addition in only a decade or so of a billion new people to the global jobs market-place.

The result (it was said) as India and China and some others started to use IT on a vast scale would be dramatic for Western wage levels.

We had grown used to the idea that wages and living standards would edge up. But why should they, if any employer could call on the skills of so many smart people round the globe prepared to work for the same - or much less?

This in turn gave many governments a huge problem: how to pay for social services as the numbers of those seeking them drifted up but the number of people paying for them (and the money paid into the pot) trended down?

One answer of course is that this development is in fact a stunning opportunity to reduce government in its cumbersomely unsustainable Industrial Age form. Mainly because there is no choice.

Be that as it may, have a look at PeoplePerHour.com, a superbly simple way to find people not to do Jobs but to perform ad hoc tasks at the pay rate selected by the 'service buyer''.

Anyone round the world can join. If you or your business want an article or piece of software written or some research done, simply post the requirement and indicative remuneration. Offers - and prices - will come in soon from potential providers.

This site allows those seeking a hired hand to define to a fine degree the specification of the task in hand, and so reduce significantly the costs/overheads and hassle of employing someone even part-time. But the provider too gets a say in negotiating the deal and the price. Elegant, efficient and fair.

By the way, I yesterday signed up as a Provider. Why not? Two small job proposals have arrived by email in the first 24 hours. I have responded to one. A brisk start.

Outsourcing on steroids. Welcome to something close to a truly free labour and creativity market. The future way hundreds of millions of people will be working?

Imagine. The End of Management?

Does it matter if Europe's population declines faster than in other regions? If it does matter, why does it matter?

Here is a neat summary of a few of the issues. I like this line:

I can't shake the idea that the demographic projections are a civilization-wide vote of no confidence. It's one thing to lose your population to war, famine or plague. It's quite another to do so out of boredom and despair.

I once drafted a speech for Sir Geoffrey Howe on Population issues. In researching it I hit upon the following Thought.

Take an African country where the population is growing quite quickly - lots of youngsters everywhere. The government there is worried and decides to try to stabilise the nation's demographic trends. It passes a law which says that from that day onwards no couple may have more than two children (those couples already having more than two may keep them).

If that law is 100% respected from Day One, when does the population stop growing?

When I put this simple question to people most stare blankly. Maths! Some say that it stops immediately. Others say more vaguely "maybe in 40 years or so?".

The answer is obvious, once you know it.

Leaving aside immigration/emigration factors, a nation's population grows because more people are being born than are dying. In a country where the population is growing fast, lots more people are being born than are dying.

So, the stability brought about by the new law starts to take effect when the children born the day after the new law comes into effect die of old age, ie in some seventy years' time.

Thus population growth builds up Momentum which rumbles through decades or even centuries.

But likewise population decline builds up hard-to-stop momentum. With fewer children around the numbers of people in retirement grows much faster than the number of people working to support them. Hence Europe and Russia and Japan trundle inexorably towards a very difficult future.

Alas for Europe, our leaders see all this but will not open a serious public debate on it for fear of a massive row with the sprawling 'social' establishment: how dare these leaders - almost all white men - urge women to have more babies? Omigod, they'll be trying to stop abortion next!

Of course, those views will slowly but surely become extinct too.

Being a speech-writer for a leading politician is not an easy job.

I did it for two years, as the FCO official speech-writer for then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe.

Sir Geoffrey set a high standard. He insisted on his texts offering the maximum amount of meaning and unrelenting logic condensed down into as few words as possible. He was always on the look-out for pointing up what he called 'paradoxes' - areas of life and philosophy where we all wanted to have our cake and eat it.

All that was fine; impossible to imagine better writing training discipline than working to and fro over important draft texts to get them Just Right.

But there was one frustration. A speech-writer wants to see his/her brilliant words getting wide coverage. Alas for me, Sir Geoffrey was the far opposite of a contemporary political spinner. Rather than get something which was 98% fine out to the media in summary form, he would want to tweak the language just one more time himself to get it perfect.

So deadlines and headlines were missed. And plenty of my (and his) more vivid, memorable lines went down well enough on the day but otherwise evaporated.

We did do well with a major speech on Food Policy in April 1986, an attempt to summarise in a light but significant way some of the policy dilemmas arising from food subsidy programmes in different parts of the world.

Working on this production I mulled over the bizarre fact that at the time (mid-1980s) we in the West were spending huge sums in the 'arms race' with the Soviet Union, while simultaneously subsidising the Soviet Union's ability to produce weapons through cheap EU farm exports of 'surplus' food produced by the CAP.

I came up with a phrase to address this folly which sounded rather snappy, even if it did not mean much: the Diet of Detente.

Sir Geoffrey did not like it: "But what does it mean?" I said that it meant nothing in particular, but it could make a good sound-bite and catch popular attention. In successive drafts he kept deleting it, I kept slipping it back in.

Finally it survived, and of course was picked up by the papers the following day - this was one speech which made it to the media for their deadlines and went down well.

Similar to-ing and fro-ing goes on with all speech-writers. One of the greatest speeches of our times was delivered by Ronald Reagan in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate beside the Berlin Wall: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

And here is where it came from, a supreme yet moving moment of moral and political leadership, surviving the attempts by different US bureacracies to strike it from the text for being ... naive, clumsy and provocative.

Sir Geoffrey Howe's most famous speech of course was his resignation statement in the House of Commons in November 1990. It helped bring down Margaret Thatcher. 

His own work. Don't blame me.

This AP story about a robotic street-patroller catches the eye.

It took a while to invent one. But they were anticipated by Ray Bradbury back in 1951...

The goings-on in Canada over free (or is it free?) speech and the activities of Human Rights Commissions seem complicated to outsiders.

So it is helpful to have the whole sorry business explained once and for all.

Via Arts and Letters Daily this compare and contrast clash between two modern women and their attitudes.

In one corner: writer Rebecca Solnit on how men patronise women.

In the other: anatomically all-present-and-correct(!) Amy Alkon, Advice Goddess, on how Rebecca Solnit is "subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest" (not to mention sniveling, meek, mewling and many other things).

Stand well back.

More hi-octane prose from (of course) Camille Paglia bearing down on Hillary Clinton and her prospects.

Questions.

Camille says this :

Furthermore, Hillary's mythomania and her chameleon-like daily alterations of persona and voice are unsettling. (Even Hillary's eye colour is fake: she wears blue contact lenses.) No male candidate enjoys Hillary's options as a woman to tailor her costume to the audience.

Is this true?

Would it be better for them (and for us?) if men running for office did have a full 'womanly' range of such colour-coded options?

And does it really help Hillary to have such options if she apparently uses them in a contrived way?

Would the consistently classic and classy look of Condoleezza Rice be more persuasive for men and women voters alike? 

(OK OK, Condi too sometimes makes some unexpected fashion statements.)

On my Foreign Office travels I have picked up a goodly selection of 'European' languages to add to my distant A-Level French and Latin and O-Level German and Spanish.

First, back in 1981 I learned lot of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (then called 'Serbo-Croat').

After that I reached a reasonable standard in Afrikaans - one of very few diplomats in South Africa who learned it.

Then I had a crash course in Russian, but I never quite got on top of it; the Russian vocabulary is just too wide, not to mention the extra layers of grammar piled on to the usual Slavic basics. I nonetheless ended up being able to muddle my way through meetings in Russian with Russian diplomats at the MFA as long as they did most of the talking.

And then finally in 2003 after some eleven weeks of feverish tuition I learned Polish, to the point where I could read the newspapers and follow TV and even get through official meetings at a high level without an interpreter from Polish into English.

I suspect that Polish is the hardest Slav language. It has a wide vocabulary, most of Russian's grammatical quirks plus all sorts of other unique features drawing deep from Poland's courtly past. 

Thus Poles usually do not address each other as 'you' ("may I offer you a cup of tea, Mary?"). They instead talk to each other in the third person, even to work colleagues whom they have known for years:  "Would Madam Mary like a cup of tea?" All a bit linguistically and even psychologically ... heavy to most outsiders.

My Conclusions after that lot?

1)     The most valuable subject I did at school was Latin. It opened the way to picking up lots of French and Spanish fairly easily, plus the grammar gave me a strong head start in all the Slav languages.

2)     Language text books are alas written by language teachers, not language learners.

Language teachers are rather serious about their subject. They also are snooty about how utterly unlike any other language 'their' language