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This site will be down for maintenance around lunchtime on 14 March.

So there we are.

I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to 'Presidents' Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders.

Parts of it was written by the EU's version of our old friend the Postmodernism Bureaucratic Generator, a computer program which assembles plausible sounding jargon words in a more or less random way to produce sentences which have a creepy plausibility but absolutely no meaning:

In this context, we ask the Commission to convene without delay a new forum for the mutual evaluation of national practices to help identify and bring down unjustified regulatory barriers, examine alternatives to regulation which ensure high professional standards and assess the scope for further alignment of standards to facilitate mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

We look forward to the Commission report on the outcome of sectoral performance checks and call on the Commission to fulfil its obligation under the services directive to report comprehensively on efforts to open up services markets and to make recommendations for additional measures, if necessary in legislation, to fulfil the internal market in services

Anyway, I have analysed this ghastly thing over at Telegraph Blogs

First, it is absurdly long. 1656 words. It has succumbed to an acute case of EDDS (European Dustbin Drafting Syndrome), where successive versions of the text get ever more obscure additions as bureaucrats throughout twelve governments press their pet concerns, and no one dares say "Stop!"

Concluding thusly:

Had I been in No 10 I would have advised the Prime Minister not to sign such a text. It wastes time, and (worse) it’s undignified.

Much better that he drop a short private line to Messrs Barroso and Van Rompuy to say that he knows that eleven other leaders are writing this letter, and that he supports the thrust of it: without significant speedy EU-wide steps to promote growth and cut bureaucracy, the crisis will intensify. Who knows, they might even have read it.

Over at Commentator I gallop through some of the issues arising from the splitting-up of countries, drawing on the examples of the collapse of the USSR and SFRY, and seeing how far they apply to Scotland.

The division of Czechoslovakia into two units might well be more relevant, as a commenter fairly points out. But I haven't followed that one personally, so do not feel qualified to say much about it.

One point I did not mention is the radical impact Scottish independence might have on all sorts of other separatist causes . The United Kingdom is seen round the world as a country which for all its annoying post-imperial pretensions has achieved incredible results through its long, stable democratic traditions. The eventual example of Scotland breaking away (albeit under closely negotiated terms) might well embolden others to say that if it's OK for areas to break away even from the best-run democracies, it's surely OK to demand separation from less than well-run democracies.

Plenty for the next leadership in Moscow to think about in that sense - across Russia's vast time-zones are plenty of territories itching to have a lot more say in their own affairs. Republika Srpska? Any number of places in Africa? Certain other EU countries? 

In other words, Scotland v UK is just another example of the wider phenomenon of institutions created in very different times no longer seeming fit for purpose and yielding to a highly focused democratic impulse for complete change. That the new institutions might not be much better in any particular respect (and that the opportunity cost of setting them up could be incredibly high) is not necessarily going to stop people insisting on them.

My piece over at Telegraph Blogs about language teaching and learning in UK schools has attracted 226 comments so far.

First, an apology to Will Hutton. My piece said that Hutton's Guardian article on this subject did not make clear that learning languages is hard work. Openmind2010 points out that he did in fact do so. In all the drafting excitement I somehow missed that rather basic fact. Old age.

Otherwise the usual stream of collective consciousness and sub-consciousness, some but not all on the immediate points raised:

I always considered if you listened to Labour the British empire was something to be horribly ashamed of that we should continually apologise for and make sure we paid trillions of people back with 'integration' and 'multiculturalism'.

The haughty bougeoise attitude (always expressed in 'caring' terms a la Horrorperson) of NuLab, Ltd's elite towards the general population is nowhere better illustrated than in this matter. The children of the great unwashed were too stupid to learn foreign languages, and so they should not be 'forced' to try to learn them. To do so was not 'inclusive', and was probably somehow 'racist'

Liberalism; what your country turns to when the race is to the bottom and lowest common denominator in every category of society.  Forget those stupid Russians and those impetuous Chinese, we are going to - once again - do the impossible and produce a silk purse using a sow's ear.  Education is like that and there are even "advanced degree programs" for those liberal losers who can decry the silk purse in florid, fluid fluttery.  You can't eat it, but you do know the way to the government benefit office.

... it is sensible not to force pupils down a road they don't wish to go and give them flexibility. The curriculum should not be too proscriptive where foreign languages are concerned. It just makes a mockery of Crawford's statement "thanks directly to Labour Party policies language learning in British education is disappearing from British state schools and fast becoming an important reason to send a child to private school (if that can be afforded)." Public schools are not bound by gov't legislation but it shows that on the issue of voluntary languages after 14, Labour and public schools were at one. Crawford is the odd one out and doesn't know what he's talking about.

'Chinese is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.'
That's absolutely not true. Chinese is structurally and grammatically an extremely simple language and far simpler than English (no verb conjugations, no singulars and plurals, no gender, no inflections, no agglutination, no almost anything that can make many European languages such a slog to learn). It's just that it has absolutely nothing in common with the Indo-European languages with which most Europeans are familiar. Anybody who has a good ear and can be bothered to sit down and methodically learn 2,000 or so Chinese characters can learn it (and by extension acquire around two-thirds of Japanese and Korean vocabulary into the bargain).

But then there's also this, from Cutley: Sorry, seems a good piece, but I hate the illiterate use of "insofar" rather than "in so far". I couldn't go on reading after that.

Illiterate? Moi? Here's what I wrote:

[Hutton] is coy on the causes of this phenomenon. Insofar as he calls anyone in particular to account, it is the UK’s current Coalition Government.

I have to say that I have been labouring (sic) under the impression for most of my life that insofar as used in this sense is one word, not three. In so far as feels oddly clumsy. Yet it seems that this usage is hotly contested by Cutley and maybe by other purists.

My two volume Oxford Dictionary indeed does not have insofar listed. Eeek. My Chambers Dictionary does have it - with a qualification: See in

The Internet has thoughts firmly working in my favour. See eg here. Wiktionary says insofar is an Americanism. Yet Webster's Online Dictionary traces the word back to 1514 or earlier, suggesting that it was not - at that point at least - very American.

Meanwhile my English dictionaries all have inasmuch as one word. Then there are all those excellent legalisms such as hereinafter, wherein, thereinbefore and so on.

Conclusion? It's a bit harsh to call insofar as an illiteracy. It may not be 'pure' English English, but it's surely within the range of the reasonable. And as readers here know all too well, what is English and what is American comes and goes down the decades: see honor and honour.

Where I myself do draw the line is underway, as opposed to under way. Yet that ugly thing is fast establishing itself, as in underage and underwear.

No-one has an answer to when a determined effort should be made to defend a language point and when to let grammar and spelling wash dreamily away. Are we now under the torrent of techspeak and instant messaging moving back towards the freeform English of the Shakespeare era when people wrote the language largely as they thought fit? Look at Bulgarian, which has dropped many of the familiar Slav endings. Life in Bulgaria goes on well enough?

These details are why learning foreign languages is such a hard job, a point on which Will Hutton and I can warmly agree. As this curious linguistic insofar point itself shows, learning accurate English is difficult enough

Here's my latest LSE book review, on a new book by Charlie Beckett with James Ball describing the rise and fall of Wikileaks:

One of the key advantages of WikiLeaks as seen by its avowedly radical ‘hacktivist’ creators led (loosely speaking) by Julian Assange is that it subverts all existing categories of pretty much anything: geography, law, morality, self-restraint. The book notes that by aiming for impunity from the law WikiLeaks hopes for immunity from the consequences of the ‘wider settlement between journalism and society’ (sic) and “a less-reported but similarly liberating degree of ethical and moral flexibility”. Hmm. Which tyrant down the ages has not hoped for such ethical and moral ‘flexibility’?

Take the vital issue of ‘protecting sources’, something journalists claim to be a core part of their professional responsibility. Assange is quoted as saying that any US informants in Afghanistan who were murdered by the Taliban as a result of WikiLeaks revelations deserved their fate, a loathsome and – as he found – unsustainable position.

Likewise the book records that WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential documents about corruption in Kenya led to riots in 2007 which 1300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. The authors’ assessment is at best baffling: “It also indicated that Wikileaks, and Assange in particular, were prepared to make a different risk calculation that accepted some incidental harm for the ‘greater good’ of transparency.” Had a Western politician described the deaths of 1300 Kenyans as ‘some incidental harm’ caused by a different risk calculation in official policies, imagine the banshee shriek.

In this moral tarpit some people see in WikiLeaks a source of hope. The book quotes ‘cyber-optimist’ Clay Shirky: “it represents, in its irresponsibility, a space for reform and progress”.

No thanks. WikiLeaks is by any normal standards a malign phenomenon based on a business model of stealing then selling other people’s information. It has surged sensationally across the media firmament but now looks bedraggled and discredited. As the authors note in the epilogue, former WikiLeaks enthusiasts are writing it off, as further damage has been done to its credibility.

The real value of this fascinating but uneven book is that it reminds us that especially in an age of ‘anything goes’ e-leaks, the heart of credible journalism remains a sense of unwavering professional responsibility – and a good old-fashioned sense of honour.

Check out the rest.

Here's the link to the next UK Speechwriters' Guild conference, in London on 23 Feb.

The theme is Make it Stick: Techniques for Leaders to Get Their Message Across. An excellent line-up of speakers/presenters, not least a cameo appearance by myself, and a disgracefully good bargain at £249 for the day.

I'll be talking in the later morning about the problem speechwriters have in making a speaker sound spontaneous. Too many speakers are given a text which gives them no room for improvisation, and does not help them express to the full whatever capacity for good speaking they may have.

The draft speech needs to be written in colloquial language and then laid out in a way which helps the speaker have a conversation with the audience, not give a lecture.

Easier said than done, of course.

Be there. Or be square. Not many tickets left.

Long time no write. Somewhere between Writer's Block and despair at the surging stupidity seen in all directions. Plus nursing my aching ankle and visiting Liechtenstein on a new ADRg Ambassadors training expedition.

The roleplays in Liechtenstein included a couple of exercises where chairing a meeting was part of the skill. The great thing about delivering training is that you think - perhaps for the first time ever - about why you do what you do, and what works (or not).

Thus chairing a meeting.

The smart way to get results is to define the issues in a positive, light-touch style right at the start, thereby (in effect) ruling various options in, but also implicitly ruling some out. If this is done well, the chair can shape the way the participants themselves look at what is happening.

A good way to start is to say in a very few words what the meeting needs to achieve - and why that achievement matters (obliquely flattering the others present). Then you try to sum up in literally a few words what the key issues are:

Can we agree up front that we need to sort out three things today?

First, Money - how much are we all prepared to put in to the new projects?

Second, Balance - how to divide the available resources between the different priorities. The tricky problem here is the fact that it is much easier to get anything done in country X, but the needs in country Y are much greater.

And third, Leadership. Who will be the figurehead of the project as a whole, and who will have the lead operational responsibility?

Some of the participants may want to add another element (say Urgency, or Security, or Other Partners). Fine. The advantage of the chair spelling out in such simple terms the core questions is that it makes it easier for others to frame/articulate their own concerns in a similarly direct way.

Another skill of a good chair is 'pocketing progress'. If someone makes a concession, go out of the way to say that that move is welcome/helpful. Having done that, be careful about seeking clarification on points of detail: that may give the person concerned the opportunity to backtrack.

Don't ignore 'good listening' skills. Copious notes should not be taken by the chair. The chair should be adept at 'reframing' what a participant has said, again subtly steering the conversation in a helpful and constructive/consensual direction and recalling the key words used at the start:

I think what I'm hearing from you is a willingness to be flexible on Money in return for a greater share in the Leadership. Is that a fair summary? 

Also reflect back their 'intensity'. If someone is getting agitated, a good chair should not sit back and smirk but rather show by body language and tone of voice that that person's opinions are being heard:

It's clear that you're very unhappy with how we are tackling Balance. Has anyone any suggestions for how those concerns might be met?

The plan, in other words, is to build a momentum of general goodwill and cooperation, then - having got everyone in some sort of positive frame of mind - start to nail down more controversial details.

All much easier said than done. See eg the skills needed to chair an EU Summit meeting on a new Eurozone Treaty when things get really difficult.

That story about my having contributed to the energetic Berlin Speech by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski has reappeared, this time in a piece by Krzysztof Szczerski MP, a member of the Polish opposition.

It's in Polish. But the opening passage caught my beady eye.

In it Mr Szczerski notes the sharp tone of criticism directed in that speech towards the UK and claims that Mr Sikorski has confirmed that I "as a private Labour Party supporter" had been a collaborator on the speech.

Ha ha.

My latest book review for LSE books was sent in the other day. A review of a compilation of blog writings by successful ex-blogger and junior Minister (under Labour) Tom Harris MP.

Here's the review. I was none too charitable, alas. The whole thing looked like a rather poor rushed job and just did not hang together in any sensible way.

I sometimes muse about publishing in book form some of my own blog writings. But it's not easy to make this work well, as the blog and book genres are quite different:

Nevertheless, these are blog pieces made public as events happened, not brutal senior private diary entries revealed to an amazed world several years later. As Tom Harris puts it in the Introduction,”the blog became an exercise in self-restraint and discipline in how to write in an interesting and even loyal away about politics … What you want is gossip”.

Which is mainly what we get. Tom Harris’ rich but inchoate views on Doctor Who, Genesis and X-Factor are shared with folksy observations on the Westminster world as seen by a busy junior Minister and diligent MP. The book is organised not by date but by themes, which themselves cast light on Tom Harris’ tabloidly parochial instincts: “How do you solve a problem like Gordon?”; “Government: better than the alternative”; “In defence of politics”; “Telly”; and so on. If the European Union was mentioned in any serious way, I certainly missed it.

There may be no better way of presenting such previously blogged material, but the themes scarcely hang together. Effective political blogging delivers what the writer hopes are insightful thoughts on the emerging issues of the day, if not the hour. Detached from the flow of events, individual pieces lose impact and context.

Anyway, no sooner had the review gone up than Tom Harris' vivid political career hit another iceberg. He was forced to step down today from his position as Labour's 'Social Media Tsar' (sic) after producing what was actually (as such things go) quite a good Downfall spoof on Alex Salmond. Which you can see here:

The squawks of synthetic indignation from the SNP might have led a Labour Party with backbone to start producing new Salmond Downfall spoofs every week for the next few years. But no. They caved. It was 'offensive'. And Tom Harris resigned.

Of course the really idiotic thing about all this is that Labour thinks it needs a 'Social Media Tsar' at all. The whole point, Labour, of social media is that it is a spontaneous crowd-sourcing Towers of Babel chaotic phenomenon in which order emerges as it does. It's utterly unsuited to any sort of political busy-body Tsardom. See?

My review led to a funny Twitter-spat out there in the social media cyberspace between me and one @RetiringViolet who may or may not be Violet but is certainly not Retiring in her efforts to portray Mr Harris as someone capable of the profound thought so firmly absent in the book I reviewed: 

RetiringViolet Retiring Violet

@

@LSEpoliticsblog So @CharlesCrawford thinks @TomHarrisMP & all politicians shd only b driven by puritan ideology not practical conviction?

CharlesCrawford Charles Crawford

@

Er, no. I'm reviewing @TomHarrisMP's book: too much 'practical conviction' and nothing else reads oddly @RetiringViolet @LSEpoliticsblog

RetiringViolet Retiring Violet

@

@CharlesCrawford @TomHarrisMP @LSEpoliticsblog ...stherefore that book shdnt be the basis on which u judge him 2 have no 'profound thought'

@CharlesCrawford Charles Crawford

Good grief. Not what I said in review. Best if you do my LSE book reviews from now on! @RetiringViolet @TomHarrisMP @LSEpoliticsblog

Part of the problem facing the Eurozoners as they struggle to convince global markets that all is under control so DON'T PANIC is identifying what exactly is the issue which needs solving. After all, they might make a bad situation worse by misdiagnosing what needs to be done.

Views on this differ. In the interests of fair play, here is a studious article (pdf) by C Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard which argues that the Eurozone is heading for the right outcome (ie 'comprehensive economic and monetary union') by the crafty ploy of (in effect) eliminating all the wrong ones:

A reader kindly points me in the direction of a blog written by Denis MacEoin which aims to portray Israel in a fair (and therefore favourable) light.

Not least in this powerful letter he has sent to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, which offers the worthy prelate some food for thought after the Archbishop offered some prayers for 50 families facing 'expropriation'of their land by the Israeli authorities:

Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.

Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.

Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...

... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.

It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...

I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:

Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.

There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.

Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.

We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.

But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?

Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?

I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.

The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.

This really matters.

Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.

Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?

Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?

There was an interesting insight the other day, when a pro-Obama academic breezily proclaimed the Obama Administration impressively if not unprecedentedly scandal-free - by defining scandals as only those scandals which the mainstream media report!

Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:

But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...

Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.

So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?

The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.

Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..

And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of  cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.

This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.

The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.

Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.

So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:

A reader sent me this email message on New Year's Eve:

I just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year.  "Spark of hope" indeed!  More power to you!

What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup - that's this website!

Much appreciated.

I have looked at the numbers for readers here in 2011. According to one way of crunching them, I peaked in August with 11,500 unique visitors (ie people, not Google spiders) and hit a low in July (5200 visitors). Over the year as a whole 86,600 unique visitors swung by (some more than once, I suspect), giving 258,000 visits for the year looking at 700,000 pages.

That's just over 7000 unique visitors per month, which given the esoteric, eccentric, annoying and often rather specialist subject-matter of most posts here is OK by me.

It was again especially gratifying that some 30,000 visits lasted for 30 minutes to an hour, or even longer. Some of you really like rummaging around and spending time here. This in fact is why I decided to write a blog and not a book* about my life and times in diplomacy. With the blog I get more readers, and more interaction - a relationship.

My main problem is that I am spreading my declining intellectual jam a bit thinly these days. As well as keeping up some sort of flow of work here (latterly noticeably reduced, but there you are), I emit Tweets at @charlescrawford, write a monthly column for DIPLOMAT magazine, do book reviews for the LSE website and contribute assorted rants to The Commentator. In the last weeks of 2011 I was signed up as a Daily Telegraph blogger too. Not to forget a number of other articles for business and foreign policy websites.

That's a lot of material to create almost every day. And while I am mulling over what if anything to say next on one or other of these outlets, I have to try to earn a living by writing speeches or training or consulting or whatever comes along.

This site has not been any special money-spinner - more a money-loser in terms of the opportunity cost of generating all these words for free. The ads I added to the site this year bring in nothing much so far(!), but I have had a couple of approaches via the site for fee-paying work, including an invitation to give a keynote speech at an event in Romania later this year.

Anyway, many thanks to you all for your support and unobtrusive but wise thoughts. I hop into 2012 still nursing my gammy ankle which I twisted observing the Russian elections in early December. I'll try to be a bit more productive here this year, but don't count on my succeeding. If you don't fine me here I'll be over at one of the other places mentioned above. Or not.

Happy New Year to all

* A reader asks via Twitter - have I written enough words for a book?

Hmm - let's see.

It turns out that a normal book contains anything up to 120,000 words. If we take this one post as average, it has some 500 words. I have written 2400 posts here. Which makes something like 1,250,000 words roughly ten books. That's not counting over 30 DIPLOMAT articles at 1500 words each (three more books!). And all the other website pieces.

So that's something like 15 or more respectably long books. All written just for you. For free!

The wonders of the Internet. Maybe I should make a compendium and try to self-publish via Amazon or something. The perfect gift for next Christmas?

Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world:

Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to be discreet, anonymous, detached, aloof, rarefied. In a word, invisible.

When I joined the Foreign Office in 1979 the rules on such things were clear and strict. UK-based diplomats would never appear in the British media: that was what Ministers were expected (and wanted) to do. Overseas it was slightly different. British diplomats had some discretion to respond to foreign media requests for interviews and statements, but when in doubt, they should check with the FCO News Department in London. No Foreign Minister wanted to have their breakfast ruined by opening the newspaper to find a sensational report of something unexpected or unwelcome proclaimed by an FCO official overseas.

Back then these limitations on diplomatic media appearances made sense: the media themselves were restricted. In Britain and elsewhere there were a tiny number of TV stations and relatively few newspapers. Official foreign policy pronouncements could – and should – be rationed accordingly to keep everything at a suitable level of sobriety.

This all changed. Along came new technology, CNN, the internet, Twitter and Facebook, a proliferation of TV channels available across the planet at any time of day or night, digital radio, blogging. A Tower of Babel. A tsunami of noisy words, comment, pseudo-analysis and even, now and again, some facts. The media are increasingly no longer something separate or ‘above’ the general public. The media are the general public.

Or the general public are the media...

With added free media presentation tips for getting messages out in this hubbub:

One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers.

No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus on one or two of them to help the reader make sense of it all.

Likewise it is a good idea to take a single issue and use it to illustrate a wider point. Or to take a seemingly obscure but nonetheless interesting question and force it to the top of people's attention.

All these devices help achieve the basic rule of good (and therefore impactful) writing: if you want it to be read, make it readable.

One of the best examples from my own career came in early 2004, not long after I arrived in Warsaw from Belgrade. Poland was set to join the European Union. Colossal numbers of Poles were likely to start moving to and fro between Poland and the UK - we had decided to open our Labour market unconditionally, much to the utter disbelief of the Polish leadership.

Once those Poles started moving with the aim of getting richer faster, what would they get up to? I thought it worth analysing one possible source of income - illicit cigarettes.

Hence a telegram I sent to London warning them in very simple language that the UK's multi-billion pound problems with the informal cigarette market was about to get a whole lot worse overnight.

I did this by spelling out in the simplest possible terms the economics for the average Pole of informal cigarette-selling, even within legal limits.

This telegram wittily called Smoking Ants - Coming Our Way? caused a minor sensation in the Cabinet Office. Officials scrambled round to change the rules to limit the numbers of cigarettes which people from the new EU member states could bring into the UK duty-free.

And, thanks to the miracles of Freedom of Information, I am pleased to share this telegram with you today. The FCO cheekily cut out a line or two on the grounds that UK relations with Poland might be adversely affected(!). But otherwise it's just as I drafted it. A nice example (if I say so myself) of drawing senior attention to an unexpected new problem by delivering work written in a bold way which no-one can avoid reading.

Diplomatic Folly Note: look out for the amusing reference to 'Trilateral' at the end. That was a footling attempt by Tony Blair to set up an inner UK/France/Germany driving force within the EU, which collapsed in no time at all in the face of the obvious objections (not least those emanating from one S Berlusconi).

Thus:

SUBJECT: EU ENLARGEMENT: SMOKING ANTS, COMING OUR WAY?

SUMMARY

1. Incentives for Poles to make a reasonable living in the UK's dodgy cigarette business. Policy contradictions.

DETAIL

2. As a non-smoking connoisseur of Balkan tobacco activities I recently met the local BAT team to talk about regional cigarette smuggling. Some striking conclusions.

The Big Picture

3. BAT have studied tens of thousands of discarded cigarette packets. They conclude that some 70 billion cigarettes are sold legally in Poland every year, with a further 20 billion smoked "illegally" (ie sold outside the official excise structure and smuggled into Poland).

4. A good proportion of this illegal trade is conducted by an army of "ants", individuals who carry small quantities of cigarettes into Poland from points East. But up to 50% of the illegal cigarette business is well organised, involving hundreds of truckloads of cigarettes each containing up to 10 million "sticks". [redacted]

5. The emergence of this lucrative illegal trade can be traced readily back to 2000, when Poland pushed up excise duties. Until then almost all the 90 billion cigarettes smoked in Poland each

year were passing through normal procedures. Smuggling soared with these new higher duties.

6. Sharp price/tax/excise differentials as between Russia, Poland and Western Europe are set to continue. Currently a pack of cigarettes which costs 50 cents in Russia sells for 1.30 dollars in Poland and up to 8 dollars in the UK. These ratios will change somewhat in the coming years as Poland raises the effective price of a pack towards EU levels, thereby giving serious new local incentives to regional smugglers (one good truckload can generate a profit of 1.5 million dollars). BAT expect some 50 billion cigarettes per year to be smuggled from Russia to Western Europe; this generates a 5 billion dollar profit - more than double BAT's own global annual pre-tax profit. Implications for UK of EU Accession

7. BAT point out that as things stand every Polish citizen is allowed to bring legally into the UK 200 cigarettes a trip. But after accession this figure jumps to 3200 cigarettes per trip. A pack of Dunhill can be bought in Poland for about £1 and be sold in a UK pub for up to £3.00. Each Pole entering the UK can hope to make a quick profit on the cigarettes of £250 per trip, not to mention extra money by importing a few bottles of cheap vodka. With a return coach fare of £50 and monthly unemployment benefit here of about £80, it is not difficult for a poor Pole to work out what to do. Better to get involved with UK officialdom by filling in UK benefit forms, or make easy money sitting on a bus?

COMMENT

8. The scale of the illicit cigarette business caused by price/tax differentials as between the UK and continental Europe is obvious and well known. It is part of a global compound interest drama: as rich countries get richer, the absolute wealth we generate gives ever-growing and vast incentives for honest people and gangsters alike to "play the margins". The cigarette price effects of EU enlargement is more of the same, albeit a great deal more of the same. But the upstream consequences of this illegality for the region are considerable.

9. Our Policy contains Contradictions. HMCE/HMT are looking at reducing the amounts of cigarettes which accession nationals can bring into the UK. Meanwhile we and our EU partners laboriously try to "train border guards and customs officials" on the EU's Eastern Borders. But only a couple of truckloads of cigarettes inject more resources into corrupting these official structures than we are injecting into reforming them. The corrupted structures then can be exploited not only by cigarette smugglers but also by human traffickers, global drug dealers and even terrorists - serious security questions here.

10. The cost of all this is not on a scale to destabilise the whole of Polish society as has happened in Serbia, to the point of the assassination of the Prime Minister. But it is a serious and systemic obstacle to reform. Scope for a new, hard look (Trilateral or in another smaller group first?) at what else might be done on the strategic level?

To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that.

Thus yesterday:

We awoke this morning to various commentators and Twitteristas bewailing the fact that British intransigence has left the UK “isolated". This ridiculous assertion needs to be knocked on the head, once and for all.

If “isolated" means staying well clear of the clumsy and ultimately undemocratic eurozone project, that’s a damn good place to be. The measures needed to prop up the eurozone involve intrusive inspection of national financial affairs by Brussels and other changes (such as harmonising tax rates) which necessarily amount to surrendering national sovereignty to EU HQ. Without the protocol he demanded, David Cameron could not have stood up in the House of Commons and honourably told the British people that the UK would be spared that.

In fact, even with that protocol there would have been in serious risk of eurozone “mission creep" in legal terms had the Lisbon Trinity route been used. Not that that risk has gone away even with the proposed new treaty outside the existing Treaty structure, but it is arguably for now rather more manageable.

Now what?

The proposed new arrangements for the eurozone would have been good had they been introduced right from the start. It is not clear how far if at all they will satisfy the planet’s markets and investors now. The crisis is set to drag on.

More generally, the whole European integration ambition looks like a nervous tightrope walker wobbling more and more severely with each new step. The contortions needed to stay balanced are impressive but grotesque.

And today:

As the sheer scale of the new requirements expected in the new treaty become clear – intrusive Brussels inspection of national budgets, balanced budget constitutional provisions and so on – bits will start to fall off the bandwagon. Different local factions will demand some or other political price for conceding their support to these radical changes. Public opinion will be aroused, with demands for referenda here or there. And so on.

The best thing about writing for a national newspaper's website is the giddy delirium of the many comments one attracts, for and against. Many people seem unable to understand what one writes, or miss the self-indulgent witty touches completely, or assume that because I am an ex-Ambassador I a priori am a pompous Sir Humphrey type living on a vast pension blah blah blah.

Therefore you get stuff like this:

Charles Crawford - a breath of fresh air. I bet you don't get many invitations to opine on the BBC!

For the first time, I actually have to agree with much of Mr Crawford has to say. Perhaps he could offer his expertise of the break up of the former Soviet Union during his time in the FCO, for the government for Britain's withdrawal from the EUSSR?

Magisterial and wise as one would expect from a 'Sir Humphrey' enjoying his astronomically high pension at our expense...It's rather majestic when the British Establishment makes a 'fleet turn'; all those wonderful old ships of the line coming round. The trouble is that they need an awful lot of sea room and they already got much too close to a lee shore.

Whatever leads Crawford to the conclusion that an 'amicable separation' is on the books? Why wouldn't our former partners just screw us to the floor as much as they are able? What is the USP that would stop them, if they ever climb out of the mire where they are?

Thank you Charles for your explanation, especially posting the speech by Howe.  Incredible how the same old arguments are being trotted out by the same old europhiles ignoring the twenty year interim where *nothing* turned out as predicted.  And all the guff about influence--what influence?  Although we have wasted a lot of treasure on the european experiment and the most worrisome aspect of our economic outlook is our closeness to the european economic (disaster) zone.

Dave has done more u-turns than a boy racer, so will have no problem with one on this matter.
Has to be said, Chas is a definite Rolls Royce blogger. Maybe he could get a job as Foreign Secretary, if he was quickly ennobled.

Walked the dogs earlier - a bit cold but a nice day for it. Notably, no-one from Antwerp, Lower-Saxony, Tuscany or Valencia stopped me for a chat.Looks like the isolation has started to bite

You, sir, sound like a traitor and should be treated as such. I am thinking naked, tar, feathers, high street parade, but maybe this would infringe one or two paragraphs in the EU human rights chapter, or whatever. You display all the characteristics of an aparatchik who forgot that you are/were a servant of the people and in your generous loftiness are throwing some crumbles of your superior intellect to the benighted masses.  

That last one hits it bang on the nose.

Anyway, my second one linked to this excellent Economist piece offering a detailed account of what the UK Prime Minister wanted and why he did not get it. Well worth a read if you want to look at some hard-core analysis and not a lot of heated knowledge-free opinion.

What does it all boil down to?

Not enough, if the main aim is to stop the Eurozone failing horribly as the planet's investors think we've all gone mad and draw their money out of the system.

But maybe just enough (for now) if you want to get re-elected as President of France?

Do global investors see this blood-stained arena as a sensible place to park their hard-earned money? No.

While the self-absorbed British commentariat divides into Europhile/Europhobe factions like Bertie Wooster's aunt mastodons bellowing at each other across a primaeval swamp, the real story is that the Summit did not do anything serious to tackle the eurozone's acute credibility problem.

Why did it not do more? Because top European opinion is completely divided on existential questions to do with the moral hazard involved in different eurozone rescue plans. And because step-by-step Europe's leaders have set up structures of such intricacy and complexity that it is next to impossible to identify what needs to be fixed, and then muster the practical agreement to do the fixing.

A lively day.

First, I spent the night in a wonky hotel in downtown Lewes. The room sloped alarmingly in two directions, to the point where anything smooth risked sliding off the table. The sign in the bathroom read thusly: "Shower Mat Ensure the suckers are in contact with the bath fully pressed down" A wearying period of pushing the bath in a downwards direction ensued.

Then I went to the University of Sussex, waving cheerily to a pair of woman strikers at the entrance as I whizzed past their absurd attempts to persuade me to show 'solidarity' with their 'demands'. My visit there was to give a presentation on European Conservatism to a genial seminar of political science students. Not a Chinese/Asian student in sight - they're all doing sciences, not mulling over political theory. Wait! Maybe science IS political theory.

While all this was going on, a strange story broke in Poland.

Some clever-clogs had run a Properties check on the Foreign Ministry's website version of the superb speech by Radek Sikorski in Berlin on Monday. And found that the original version of the document was called 'More Europe' - created by Charles Crawford.

Eeek.

Anyway, the Polish Foreign Ministry has put out a statement to the effect that for substantive and linguistic purposes the Minister had consulted all sorts of people including myself on the speech, and then written it himself , making changes even on the plane to Berlin.

The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza carries the story and statement if anyone is interested.

So that's that. Anyone who knows Radek Sikorski will recognise his own inimitable style throughout the text.

Meanwhile I have wended my way to Heathrow where I am taking a plane in the morning to Moscow, to spend a jolly weekend as an elections observer for the Duma (parliament) elections on Sunday. My first time back in Russia for years. As Lenin or someone similarly cynical said, "It's not voting. It's counting".

Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone.

If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced!

Not that it is perfect. Too many rather impenetrable statistics at various point. Some sentences are too long or involved.

He even - horror - takes a populist swipe at the UK (bear in mind the German audience and his own credentials as an Oxford graduate), after saying something important about 'subsidiarity'. Note how he abruptly switches to talking to the UK in the second person, as if we were in the room. Fine technique:

The more power and legitimacy we give to federal institutions, the more secure

member states should feel that certain prerogatives, everything to do with national

identity, culture, religion, lifestyle, public morals, and rates of income, corporate and

VAT taxes, should forever remain in the purview of states. Our unity can survive

different working hours or different family law in different countries.

Which brings me to the issue of whether an important member, Britain, can support reform. You have given the Union its common language. The Single Market was largely your brilliant idea. A British commissioner runs our diplomacy. You could lead Europe on defence. You are an indispensable link across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, Eurozone’s collapse would hugely harm your economy. Also, your total sovereign, corporate and household debt exceeds 400% of GDP. Are you sure markets will always favour you? We would prefer you in, but if you can’t join, please allow us to forge ahead. And please start explaining to your people that European decisions are not Brussels’ diktats but results of agreements in which you freely participate.

Fine, forge 'ahead' as you see fit. But pay for it yourselves. Don't expect too much British money if you overdo it. And don't try taxing us by the back door.

Nor is it easy to see from an admittedly befogged UK point of view how giving a turbo-boost to more powers at the European level as Sikorski suggests is in any meaningful way compatible with democracy as hitherto understood. More power to ... the European Parliament? No thanks. (Remember that one? Follow the link to see a German TV station doing a very early job to magnificent effect...)

Above all, isn't a wholesale reorganisation of  EU powers lunging in a Far More Europe way as Sikorski suggests completely unrealistic? How to negotiate a new treaty structure of such far-reaching new measures without the whole business getting bogged down in referenda and hopeless controversy? It's not by chance we have what we have. And German voters would have to be mad to allow other Europeans effectively to decide how much German money is transferred out of Germany for wider redistributive purposes.

Nonetheless, if you want to hear the message for More Europe delivered by a European foreign minister in a way calculated to impress an audience from another large member state, this is what it looks like.

This one passage - directed directly at Germany - is really good by any standard. Energetic and thoughtful, but also refeshingly blunt. An authentic contemporary rhetorical masterclass in delivering a tough message ("Listen, you helped get us all into this mess..!") to a foreign audience in their own country with style and grace.

Oh, but note too the hard-nosed Polish caveat tucked away at the end:

What does Poland ask of Germany?

We ask, first of all, that Germany admits that she is the biggest beneficiary of the current arrangements and therefore that she has the biggest obligation to make them sustainable.

Second, as you know best, you are not an innocent victim of others’ profligacy. You, who should have known better, have also broken the Growth and Stability Pact and your banks also recklessly bought risky bonds.

Third, because investors have been selling the bonds of exposed countries and flying to safety, your borrowing costs have been lower than they would have been in normal times.

Fourth, if your neighbours’ economies stall or implode, you greatly suffer, too.

Fifth, that despite your understandable aversion to inflation, you appreciate that the danger of collapse is now a much bigger threat.

Sixth, that because of your size and your history you have a special responsibility to preserve peace and democracy on the continent. Jurgen Habermas has wisely said that "If the European project fails, then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before."

What, as Poland’s foreign minister, do I regard as the biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland today, on 28th November 2011? It’s not terrorism, it’s not the Taliban, and it’s certainly not German tanks. It’s not even Russian missiles which President Medvedev has just threatened to deploy on the EU’s border.

The biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland would be the collapse of the Euro zone. And I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help it survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it.

I will probably be first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead. Not dominate, but to lead in reform. Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.

I like various Sikorskiesque personal style-touches, such as this feline one: