Blogoir: January

A fine article in Wired describes the huge job now under way to piece together millions of shreds of documents which the Stasi secret police feverishly ripped up as East Germany's peculiarly grubby and vicious form of Communism abruptly ended.

Of course in the few hours they had available the Stasi would have tried to destroy the worst (ie most incriminating) archive material first, so this mammoth effort is worthwhile for the light it casts on the sheer loathsomeness of communist rule in that part of Europe.

But it is laborious work. Even with high-tech help it will continue for many years to come.

A lot of Polish politics (and not only Polish) is about how Europe comes to terms with the communist past.

As soon as the Berlin Wall came down, those who had benefited from or were especially cruel players in the former communist regimes across Europe vigorously urged 'reconciliation' and the need to 'move on' and 'build a new society'. Not because they believed in any of that. But because they had hit a bad patch and needed time to regroup.  

Thus the more that public attention was steered towards the future and away from revealing and accounting for the past, the better the communist/KGB elite's chances of tip-toeing away from their countless crimes. Not merely unpunished - maybe even as some sort of heroes. 

This thought - that when communism was ending the emphasis should be on avoiding divisions, not on 'witch-hunts' - was remarkably seductive in Western circles too. Hence when Communist Party rule crashed in Russia we saw the failure of Western governments to insist that the revolting Lenin object in Red Square be removed from its place of honour .

I was part of the policy chain in London in the frantic months in 1991 when all that was happening. I can not explain now why the British Government did not press this vital symbolic demand. There must have been an argument that 'Yeltsin needs time to consolidate his democratic authority, so pushing this now is not a priority, plus it may give his demoralised opponents a new chance to mobilise against him'.

Well, OK.

On the other hand, by far the best time to give one's deadly enemy the thrashing he so richly deserves is when he is weak and on the ground. Yet at this supreme moment in world history ... we pulled our punches.

And Lenin is still there, a malignant Mordor-like phenomenon darkening the European political space. Indeed, Russian communists smirk that the Mausoleum is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it - but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about 'moving on'. 

From the outside the cadre of serving British Ambassadors presents a forbidding spectacle, a phalanx of Erudite Excellencies.

Once upon a time these senior officials would serve until they reached full retirement age unless they had served in unhealthy malaria-stricken postings earlier in their careers, in which case they were allowed to retire earlier (as they were not expected to live so long anyway).

Now there is more of an 'up or out' career structure. When the system concludes that you have reached the limit of your postability, you are 'encouraged' to look at other options. This sits uneasily with the idea that as society ages we need more taxpayers and so people should not be forced to retire. Will this tend to create a sad situation in which the best Ambassadors who can expect to be successful outside the FCO do indeed leave - and the less ambitious and less effective linger on?

Anyway, for whatever reason Ambassadors do leave. What do they do next? Plenty of examples:

• the House of Lords and a continuing role in High Policy
• becoming a Special Representative
• some write heartfelt Valedictory Despatches which get leaked
• some write books which are published
• some write books which aren't
• some gather together to sign a letter
• but when they do, are they an attractive sight?
• then there is Craig Murray
• and now me

All this post-Ambassadorial striving for new meaning reminds me of the stunning lines from the Illustrated Man: a group of astronauts, thrown into space when their rocket disintegrates, slowly tumble away into the emptiness:

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep ...the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

....What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me? But there's no one here but myself and how could you do good all alone? You can't. Tomorrow night I'll hit earth's atmosphere.

I'll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I'll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they'll add to the land....

When I hit the atmosphere I'll burn like a meteor. "I wonder," he said, "if anyone'll see me?"

....

"Look, Mom, Look! A falling star."

"Make a wish," said his mother. "Make a wish."

A tough question I have put to various candidates for jobs involving protocol instinct and practice:

You are supervising the seating of VIPs at the theatre for a big British theatre night. As guests arrive you are told that two top VIPs allocated to the best central front-row seats are now not going to attend. A moment for a decision! Do you:

(a)   Offer these best seats to the next most senior VIPs seated along the front row or in the second row

(b)   Try to find the Ambassador to see what should be done

(c)   Try to find the Deputy Head of Mission to see what should be done

(d)   Ask others in the front row to move along so that there is no awkward ‘gap’ in the front row

(e)   Wait until the performance starts then give the seats to your friends sitting in the aisle because of the crush

(f)    Do nothing and leave the front row gap in the seats

All plausible options!

And the answer (of course) is ... (f). Do nothing!

Why? 

Because unless there is an overriding need for action, improvised solutions tend to make things worse. Factors to note:

• what if the message is wrong/garbled? You have given the seats to someone else and the top VIPs then show up. Humiliating disaster in the most prominent place in the theatre. VIPs and others you invited will be highly annoyed/embarrassed as you try to sort it all out with the rest of the audience tittering - whole purpose of inviting them that evening wrecked
• even if the message is not wrong/garbled, any attempt to move someone else into the gap will make other senior guests wonder what is going on and why they were not chosen to have pole position - certainty of more annoyance
• if you are dealing with invited Ambassadors, NB that above all they care about their status (ie who sits where) - fiddling with carefully planned arrangements involving them is a recipe for creating serious unhappiness
• running off to check what to do is at least semi-sensible - but your job is politely to help our guests to their seats, not to disappear on errands. So get on with it.
• giving the seats to your friends is kind but wrong - the VIPs sitting in the front row will be unimpressed.
• Bottom Line: there may be a gap in the front row. So what? Once the show starts no-one will notice or care. If our guests did not show up that's their problem, not ours.

Back in real life this happened of course, in Belgrade. My kindly and well-intentioned Embassy colleague made a bee-line for by far the worst option, namely (a). One VIP we had invited felt insulted and walked out and went home in protest. I had to write him a grovelling letter of apology. 

Conclusion? When in doubt, Doing Nothing is usually a good idea.

Wait and see what happens. And, always keep in mind what Robin Renwick's old Ambassador told him, "some things are important - but don't matter". 

Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I think that appearances matter.

When one walks into a shop or office or home, what is the first impression? Smart, tidy, clean premises? People looking intelligent and interested to see you? A sense of good order?

The grand former Federation Palace building in New Belgrade was once a bustling centre of Socialist Self-Management, with countless self-important self-managers from across Yugoslavia having hundreds of totally pointless meetings aimed at furthering Titoist Brotherhood and Unity, enjoying a nice day or two away from their dull offices in the republican capitals and lesser centres of the country.

This building is now a Mausoleum to Socialist Self-Delusion, vast echoing spaces, weeds sprouting from the car-parks and few visible signs of life. Outside it is ugly and impersonal. Yet inside it has a cool Commie-Retro Sixties style, with some great paintings and many unchanged period details (elegant door-knobs, low chairs and tables with spindly legs and so on).

As Ambassador to Belgrade I would go there now and then to meet FRY President Kostunica, as he then was.

Outside his office I could not but notice an erratic row of electric plug sockets low in the wall, installed by a blind and possibly intoxicated Balkan electrician unfamiliar with the technology of either ruler or spirit-level.

Eventually I cracked, and politely pointed out to his protocol team that this poor finish in such a key position in this fine and important building did not look very good to senior visitors. They warmly agreed with me, and said that they would fix the problem asap.

On my next visit they showed me a large plant-pot and plant, placed carefully in front of the sockets so as (mostly) to conceal the disarray. "You see, we have taken your advice and solved that problem at least!" they beamed.

The rise and further rise of the so-called 'Precautionary Principle' (PP) - particularly when it comes to trying to assess the environmental impact of past and future human activity - is, some say, a defining moment in intellectual history: "the most radical idea for rethinking humanity's relationship to the natural world since the 18th-century European Enlightenment".

What is this Principle? Its supporters say that it is nothing but common sense: "All it actually amounts to is this: if one is embarking on something new, one should think very carefully about whether it is safe or not, and should not go ahead until reasonably convinced it is. It is just common sense."

But things are not so simple.  "If your position is that you don't accept any incremental risk, you are in effect saying no to all new technologies, whether it be a better anaesthetic, a better car, a better aeroplane, a safer environment for children - in fact anything worth having."

The PP itself is 'something new'. So as a common sense precaution should we think very carefully whether it is safe or not? Maybe it too will kill people.

In any case there are other ways of looking at how our fears, real dangers and the law interact. Should they too not be given a coherent airing by senior policy-makers before adopting formally one Principle over others?

A big subject.

My professional concern about PP is that far from promoting policy common sense it can diminish it.

Take the refurbishment of the British Ambassador's residence in Belgrade back in 2001. The building had been neglected during the long Milosevic years. Everything which could be painted was either Excrement Brown or Rose Pink.  The main reception room looked like the forlorn warehouse where all the worst sofas and curtains in the FCO crawled away to die in shame.

So it was agreed that we should upgrade things in the next couple of years. But we had not reckoned with "what if" PP as articulated by the FCO works people...

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

Observe the alarming fertility rate of (and environmental destruction caused by) the road-signs proliferating on the A420 between Oxford and Swindon. "We already have two large road-signs warning drivers of that roundabout 300 yards ahead. But maybe we should add four more, two on each side of the road -  just to be on the safe side!"

Fine. But where does that argument stop? There are already sections of that road where there are so many signs coming thick and fast it is dangerous to try to look at them all. More and more road signs seem to mean less and less litter collecting. Squalor tempered with stupidity. Or vice versa.

A final example. When our daughter was born in 1999 we bought a new sturdy high-chair from John Lewis. Imagine our annoyance when we put it together and it had no wheels for moving it to and fro in the kitchen, even though the picture on the box showed wheels. We called the shop to remonstrate, only to be told that "EU rules" said that for safety reasons there could be no wheels on high chairs, lest infants somehow propel themselves across the kitchen, crash into a hot-plate and self-incinerate.

I pursued this with the FCO EU team. They discovered that it was not in fact an EU edict as such which had caused this decision, but some other European-level Health/Safety convention. As if that somehow made it any better.

All this bureaucratic rubbish stemming from twisted versions of PP is part of a deep process of self-inflicted Stupidisation. What is scary is that it is like a malignant virus infecting the deepest parts of the operational public policy process in all sorts of unpredictable and unexpected and ultimately irrational ways.

Why? Because let's be honest. Of course we need to think about what we do. But in the process of weighing options and trying to choose a reasonable way forward, over-focus on PP tends to empower those with high-energy neurotic anxieties and/or bizarrely lurid busybody imaginations, and compels taxpayers to waste astonishing sums of money accordingly.

How to stop it?

Back in 1984/85 I was on the FCO's Aviation Desk for a year, working mainly on Transatlantic air services issues (who could fly when and where and for how much), and in particular on the diplomatic ramifications of Freddie Laker's antitrust lawsuit against British Airways and other carriers.

The core issue here was that the threat of an award of massive triple damages against BA in the US courts was delaying unpleasantly the Thatcher Government's plans for privatising the airline. So lots of personal and eventually successful engagement took place between Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan (and even more whirring activity deep in the US and UK bureaucratic boiler-rooms) to try to find a solution.

On one occasion amidst these interesting questions we in the FCO had fallen out with officials in the Department of Transport led by Nicholas Ridley. My boss John Gray and I cranked up a lengthy tetchy draft letter to him from the Foreign Secretary, aiming magisterially to get our various points across formally at Cabinet level in the hope that he and his officials would accept the rigour of our dialectic, and fold. 

We walked round this magnificent document for approval to the next man up the policy chain, the then Assistant Under-Secretary Robin O'Neill (who 20 years later was to be spotted letter-signing). 

He perused it with disdain. Then he took out an elegant fountain pen and put a thick and unwavering black line through the draft. 

He inserted instead something like this:

"Dear Nicholas,

It appears that our officials can not agree on a couple of points to do with [issue]. Perhaps we could have a word?

Yours ever,

Geoffrey "

"Ministers really do not like it when officials try to dump a problem in their laps", he explained helpfully.

Off we went.

Maybe not much sadder. But Wiser. 

Having spent most of my working life in or dealing with societies suffering from the consequences of communism, I have tried to work out what it is communists really believe(d) in.

Communists' immediate policy goals are clear enough. To run and above all control everything on exclusively their own terms with no accountability, all in the name of The People, not people. See eg this presumably unintentionally hilarious report on elections (or, perhaps one should write, 'elections') in Cuba.

There are now vast mountains of proof that this form of control creates a dismal mess, practically and philosphically. Yet when looking at any problem Western pro-communist writers, progressive thinkers and activists still typically insist that if only there was more state intervention and control on Leftist terms, everything would work better - and would go 'forward'.

One deep common belief in varying communist worldviews is the idea of the Wheel of History.

The expression appears in the first chapter of the infamous, turgid Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848: "The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history".

This revealing passage is followed a few words later by a nice description of the lowest people in society, the 'lumpenproletariat': "the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society." Middle-class Leftist disdain for poor people who do not agree with them was there from the start.

The notion of the Wheel of History is, like the "don't worry, they'll muddle through somehow" cliche, replete with curious and questionable assumptions. That history 'moves'. That it moves 'forward'. That forward is 'good'. That it can be 'rolled back', but only with necessarily negative consequences.

My own memorable encounter with the Wheel of History imperative came in 1988 when as First Secretary Internal at the Embassy in South Africa I went to visit Govan Mbeki, who several months previously had been released from Robben Island after 24 years' imprisonment. Mbeki (father of President Thabo) was feted in progressive circles for his intellectual leadership in the South African Communist Party as well as the ANC.

I asked affable Mbeki Snr about the democratic strirrings then taking place in Poland where Solidarity were calling for free elections. Mbeki opined that he would go along with some sort of different election system in Poland and other parts of the communist world, but only on one clear condition - the elections had to be organised in such a way that the Communist Party won! "Any other result would turn back the wheel of history."

So there it was. The power of ideology. A man who had endured over two decades of harsh imprisonment wanted millions of Poles to continue to be oppressed, for no reason other than an abstract belief that their oppression was better for them and for the world than any possible alternative - that it took them 'forward'. 

Mbeki of course was steeped in the beliefs of Scientific Socialism:  "Scientific socialists apply the inductive method. They stick to facts. They live in the real world and not in the spiritualist regions of scholasticism."

The Poles, living as they did in the real world run by Communists, stuck to facts. They wisely ignored Mbeki's advice. And threw out the Communists. 

They are now ticking along very nicely. Dare one say rolling forward?

On the subject of football and diplomacy, in 1984 the then British Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia and I as Embassy First Secretary went to see Croatia's Hajduk Split team play Tottenham in a UEFA Cup first-leg game.

At half-time Spurs were leading 1-0 and going well, Micky Hazard in outstanding form. The Ambassador went off to the VIP box. I stayed in my seat. And I saw something I never seen on any other football pitch or indeed anywhere else (I have led a sheltered life).

A Hajduk supporter sauntered out from the crowd on to the pitch and walked towards the centre circle. In his hand he gripped a live and unhappy chicken. Reaching the centre of the pitch he waved to the crowd and then ceremoniously wrung the chicken's neck, throwing the flopping body on to the grass before strolling off to great acclaim from the Croat supporters. A Hajduk official scurried out and removed the corpse.

A vivid Balkans gesture of respect and welcome for Tottenham, whose emblem of course is the cockerel.

I recall seeing nothing subsequently about this grotesque and scandalous episode in the UK media, whose representatives no doubt were busy sampling rakija and grilled meats in the half-time bar. This was long before people had the high-tech kit to film such events themselves from their mobiles and get images on the Web or otherwise make an almost instantaneous e-fuss on a large scale.

Anyway, as a bit of dark Croatian ju-jitsu it worked up to a point, as Tottenham lost the match 2-1. But they beat Hajduk in the return leg at White Hart Lane and went on to lift the UEFA Cup, albeit on a penalty shoot-out - the last time they won a European competition. 

Here are the goals from that match in Split, from a Croatian compilation of some sort.

Look at the tight, short shorts. But no sign of the Dead Chicken. 

My blog entry about allegedly Feckless Poles described how a small slip by an official interpreter caused some unwanted and unexpected headlines.

Yet that at least was a slip. Back in Bosnia in the mid-1990s the interpreters of President Izetbegovic had a much more ambitious streak.

After Bosnia's first post-conflict elections in 1996, the Contact Group Ambassadors led by High Representative Carl Bildt had to meet Izetbegovic to try to persuade him to accept the highly annoying proposal of co-President Krajisnik - then still unindicted on war crimes charges - that the new BH collective Presidency meet alternatively in the two BH Entities. This in practice meant that Izetbegovic would have to set foot in Republika Srpska - something he found repugnant. Izetbegovic insisted that all the Presidency meetings take place in down-town Sarajevo, which Krajisnik likewise claimed to find objectionable.

When our meeting with Izetbegovic happened, the International Community urged Izetbegovic to be flexible, to get his country's governance going again after so much disaster. Was a rotation of the sort Krajisnik proposed really so bad? Izetbegovic finally lost his temper as we nagged him and said crossly in Bosnian "OK, whatever he wants - we can rotate every first, second or fifth time (svaki prvi, drugi, peti put)!"

But his interpreter/adviser saw that he had been worn down. She brazenly translated that outburst as something quite different, holding the earlier line against the sort of rotation he had just accepted.

When Bildt and the Ambassadors returned to base there was general gloom at our failure to make any impact, until I (having been the only one of us who spoke Bosnian) told them that Izetbegovic had in fact made an important concession.

When the deliberate mistranslation happened, I could have intervened briskly to ask the interpreter to give a correct account of what Izetbegovic had just said. I don't remember now why I did not. A fleeting moment of self-restraint? But if I had done so that might have made things worse, as he would have been embarrassed and humiliated as well as annoyed. Being Right is one thing. Being Wise is another.

So we built quietly on Izetbegovic's effective concession and started planning the Presidency meetings on a rotating basis. This eventually led to some grim encounters in a derelict college of some sort just over the 'Serb' side of the inter-Entity boundary-line on the edge of Sarajevo. And having wasted time arguing about the venue the Presidency then started arguing about ... the table-plan! See my earlier posting on a Balkan Geometry Lesson.

Moral? Always have your own interpreter so as to try to cross-check afterwards whether any communication went awry. And when in doubt learn Bosnian. 

Back in the 1980s many in the FCO still recalled the days when a woman had to resign from the service on marriage - a fact which of course left only a tiny number of senior FCO women at the top of the British diplomatic world 20 years later.

That crass rule ended in the early 1970s, although it took a lot longer for the FCO to accept that pregnant officers should be allowed to carry on working at post - a prominent bump was not seen (by the mainly male top brass?) as altogether  'representational'.

I struck a blow for Equality back in the mid-1980s, when I served for a while as a member of the Diplomatic Service Association, the in-house staff association for career diplomats. They backed a woman colleague who had been denied a posting to an African Commonwealth country on the insistence of the High Commissioner running the Post concerned. He had argued that he already had an almost completely all-female Chancery team and that another woman might well open him and his mission to some unhelpful mirth/ridicule and so impair their local efficiency.

A very senior (male) diplomat on the DSA committee who should have known better argued grandly that obviously she had not been discriminated against - when the issue had come up she had been offered another posting equally as good.

I said that on the contrary this was an obvious case of discrimination – women had many senior public roles in the country concerned, and on evidently specious grounds she had been denied the full range of FCO postings available to a male officer. I offered to help the committee with my then still recent barrister training if she wanted to pursue the issue through the courts.  

The FCO management unerringly tended towards the wrong side of the argument but did refer the matter to the Government's Law Officers for a view. It did not take them long to say that the FCO did not have a leg to stand on. By then the African posting job had been given to someone else.

These days such banal and overt gender discrimination would not happen, not least because the system is keenly attuned to the risk of flying writs (such as this new one). Plus attitudes have changed. This has been helped by bringing in almost total transparency in the internal appraisal and postings processes - back then officers were left largely in the dark as to what was being said and decided about them. Indeed, the case above emerged only because the postings officer mentioned the High Commissioner's negative view to the officer concerned, who of course was more than annoyed.

So procedures and attitudes change. But it still takes time. In an established organisation like the FCO the gender and 'ethnic' profile of the top end of the organisation inevitably is to a degree some sort of living fossil record of attitudes and procedures up to 25 years earlier.

That may look 'conservative' or even ‘stuffy’ and ‘forbidding’. But it is a consequence of the positive fact that the FCO does pretty well at keeping key staff loyal and motivated for many years, a phenomenon which baffles many outsiders and insiders alike.  

Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office's posting policy. I think.

Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all their postings, and made a chart to show where there real expertise lay. The fascinating findings were something like this:

• there are nearly 200 countries in the world, depending on how one defines various micro-states, the Vatican and so on
• my top FCO colleagues as of 2002 had been posted to only 41 of them
• together they had had some 180 postings in their various distinguished careers
• but 112 or so of those postings had been to only five places: Paris, Washington, Bonn/Berlin, Brussels, Tokyo
• so their careers had been heavily skewed away from breadth of global and operational hands-on diplomatic experience
• and if one looked at the world's (then) troubled hot spots as described in the newspapers, almost no single senior FCO officer had had any personal experience of them at all

I wrote all this up in a terse memo, pointing out that this was not too surprising in some ways - for much of our careers there had been notably fewer countries anyway (no broken-up Soviet Union or Yugoslavia).

Plus the analysis showed that there were in fact two sorts of diplomats.

Senior folk who very skilfully haggled over and negotiated the rules of global order based comfortably, plumply and safely in Big Capitals, the UN/EU/NATO etc.

And the more junior less well rewarded poor sods (like eg me) who had to go out on the street to try to implement these rules in dangerous tricky uncomfortable places such as Bosnia, Africa, parts of Latin America, the Middle East and so on.

This had several effects, one of which was that the people actually on the ground in Hot Spots often had no real clout/authority/profile back home at a high level. Exactly the wrong way to have things set up for maximising our chances of achieving operational objectives in places where things were most difficult and where large sums of public money were being spent. 

Maybe it made sense to take a hard look at this to ensure that no-one reached the top of the FCO without having experienced recently a lot more of the dirty work to see how things actually happened? No point in having people grandly pronouncing on policies far away from the problem and devising schemes which in the messy violent reality simply might not work or even might make things worse?

I fed in this piece of paper quietly to the very top of the FCO. And, by magic or by coincidence (probably the latter), things started to change. We now have an FCO Top Gun Sherard Cowper-Coles heading a very tough Embassy in Kabul, sent there after being HM Ambassador in Saudi Arabia - that would never have happened when I was growing up.

Always a good question when a politician or senior diplomat starts talking eloquently about another country: "how much time have you yourself spent there?"

A neat way to stump your friends is to ask them how many matches (no replays - penalties decide a drawn game) it takes to have a simple knock-out football competition between four teams with one side winning.

"Er," they say, "surely three: two semi-finals get two teams into the final, then one match decides the winner?"

"Bravo!" you say. Then you ask how many games it takes to organise a knock-out competition of 127 teams so that one winner emerges.

They break out into a cold sweat and eventually give up.

"And to think I thought you were smart", you say. "The answer is 126, of course."

"How come?"

"Because in the competition only one team wins every match it plays including the final. In this case of 127 teams there must have been 126 teams who lost. Each one including the losing finalist was eliminated in one game only. So there had to be 126 games to knock them all out. Doh!"

I mention all this because it shows that for the vast majority of football fans who have ever lived football has been and will be primarily about losing, not winning. About disappointment, rather than glory. That's just how it is.

Yet now and again something happens to make all the despair worthwhile...

Climate Change. Is it happening? If it is happening is it because of humans? If so, is it all bad? And if it is all bad (or mainly bad), how to work out what we do can and wisely should do about it? What timescale counts?

In my Civil Service entrance exams back in 1975 one of the questions asked what UK policy-makers should do as a new Ice Age raced in our direction at an unfeasibly speedy speed. I forget my answer but remember being exasperated by the silliness of the question: "Draft a short position paper for managing the end of civilisation as we have known it. (Note: Marks will be deducted for poor presentation, unless the candidate can show that noxious fumes emerging from the new volcanoes in Magdalen College gardens brought about by Global Colding were a contributory factor, in which case the normal appeal procedures will pertain.)".

Here is a splendid new website Climate Debate Daily, from the stable of the magnificent Arts & Letters Daily, which allows one to rummage around in the roomy bran-tub of interesting climate change arguments and try to fathom it all out.

My view? I do find it unsettling that when I shimmy round a roundabout in my Mini Cooper S to jump the traffic queue and get to a shop a few seconds faster I am burning off the remains of some rather good plants bequeathed to us millions of years ago.

Failing that, sitting in traffic jams allows me to try to fathom out whether energy efficiency actually saves energy. Welcome to the ultra-coolly named Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate... 

Yet it all comes from the sun anyway. Maybe the wasteful and rather violent Petrol Century (from 1930-2030 or so) will turn out to have been simply the way humans in the world's inventive capitalist countries were able to build the knowledge base needed to discover how to use the sun's energy cleanly for the benefit of all.

In the meantime I am unimpressed by headlines like this one in the Times in November reporting analysis by a senior UN-supported scientific panel that warns of 'abrupt and irreversible' consequences for the world's climate brought about by human activity.

What would 'reversible' climate change actually be and achieve, in the unlikely event we could organise it sensibly? For the past gazillion years the climate has changed 'irreversibly'. That's what climates do. Would we really want to stop that?

Putting it another way, if the scientific evidence suggested that the ghastly natural phenomena now looming into view apparently because of human activity were all indeed occurring naturally, would we try to stop them?

Just say we did find a sure-thing way to stop nasty natural hurricanes from weighing into the Caribbean and to keep the Antarctic ice-shelf exactly the same size as it is now. Would we dare do it, confident that the myriad ripple-effect chaos theory consequences down the next ten, hundred, thousand, million years would all be pretty much OK for Gaia (and for us)?  Pick your definition of hubris - plenty to choose from.

Above all, we come back to timescales. If we really do end up with masses of higher taxes and lots more socialism to 'confront' and slow down climate change, my best guess is that the forthcoming Age of the Giant Mutant Cockroaches (the fearsome Roachosaurs) will inherit the earth 15.1 million years from now rather than 15.2 million.

In answering the Last Question, the long run is very long.

The success of Tomislav Nikolic in the Serbia Presidential elections first round vote ahead of current President Boris Tadic is no surprise.

Points worth bearing in mind:

• Serbia is not that big a place (some 10 million people including the Kosovo population). Some four million people voted. Nikolic came in first with 1.6 million.
• Nikolic has a serious chance of winning in the run-off as he should pick up lumps of votes from the 500,000 supporters of Ilic and Mrkonjic, both towards the disgruntled/conservative/populist part of the Serbia voting spectrum. Tadic will mop up most of the 250,000 votes for Jovanovic. But will that be enough to close the gap?
• US/European policy in the Balkans (and elsewhere) is oddly contradictory. We clamour for democracy but then often express disappointment with the results. We give the impression of assuming that deep in the forests and steep valleys of former Yugoslavia are hidden large armies of mild-mannered reasonable social democrats just itching at last to burst forth and vote for the European Highroad.
• In fact the politicians in these countries have the voters they have, not the ones we'd like them to have.
• These voters tend to vote fairly rationally. Their votes are skewed in a populist/nationalist direction not because they are inbred bigots but rather as a sort of political fire insurance - plenty of smoke and sparks still float around in the air there.
• Former Bosnian President Izetbegovic once told me that Bosnia would be ready for 'ethnic disarmament' only in fifty years.
• Which in practice means that if one uneasy ethnic community thinks that it needs to vote in the toughest available leader to help deal with other ethnic communities, those other communities say 'Ah, I told you so' and do the same.
• Thus the Kosovar vote for Hashim Thaci as Prime Minister was sure to boost the chances of the Serbian leader presenting himself as most likely to stand up to the Albanians' demands. As has happened, like clockwork.
• We try to cut our way out of this conundrum by offering an alternative incentive structure to Serbia and Bosnia - 'fast-track' processes aimed at EU membership and so on. But we do it half-heartedly, inconsistently and on the cheap.
• If you are eg a Serb donkey, which is more likely to motivate you? An admittedly sizeable juicy Euro-carrot tied to the end of a stick ten miles long, or the healthy-looking Albanian dog (fed plumply by EU taxpayers' money) barking noisily nearby?
• All that said, the rhetoric about Serbia and Russia having a mutual Slav love-in if Nikolic wins is unconvincing. Russians sniffily look down on Serbs as uppity country bumpkins speaking old-fashioned 'church slavonic'. Serbs recall all too well the brutality of Soviet troops as they 'liberated' Serbia in WW2 and look back fondly to the days of Non-Alignment when Moscow was kept well away. 
• A Nikolic run-off win nevertheless would be a set-back for the EU vision for dealing with the region in general and the Kosovo problem in particular. Serbia could start to look more like a truculent Balkan Belarus, a country in an ambiguous twilight space between 'Modern Europe' and Somewhere Else.
• Moscow would be quietly pleased - the Russians do not want the Serbs, but they also do not want Europe to have them (in both cases for reasons not altogether flattering to the Serbs) 
• Plus plenty of powerful gangsters in the region and on up into the former Soviet Union would think that such a result would be just fine.

People think the Balkans are complicated. They're not. Like everywhere else, once you examine the incentive structure it all becomes very clear. 

Civil servants of all shapes and sizes have their various dealings with the public. But rarely in this country are formal bureaucratic proceedings available to a wider public to observe.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube we can at least watch some of the remarkable exchanges between an avowedly conservative Canadian publisher Ezra Levant and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which has hauled him in to account for himself after a prominent Canadian Muslim complained about his publication of the 'Muhammad cartoons'.

Mr Levant gives a defiant and energetic defence of his right to offend anyone he darn well pleases. See here. And here. This is strong meat. And he ends with a ringing demand that the Commission find him really guilty. 

The activities of the CHRC and its findings are coming under close scrutiny, thanks to Mr Levant's defiance. Is it really the case as Mr Levant's blog asserts confidently that one of its members has placed racist/sexist material on various websites as some sort of entrapment exercise, or that rather too many of its investigations have been prompted by one of its own former employees?

Are we free because we are? Or are we free only because the state munificently says we are, with various groupings of bland bureaucrats now and then pronouncing on the 'limits' of our freedom? This gripping case is forcing that existential question for Western democracy as developed since Magna Carta right out into the open. 

The blog of Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the FCO website is an interesting attempt to make Ministers and the foreign policy process more accessible to the public.

The tricky thing with such initiatives aimed at reflecting what busy senior people think is that busy people are busy. So keeping a blog fresh (and plausibly looking like the busy people themselves have written it) is not easy. 

One entry says the following:

And the foreign policy priorities we pursue define key issues in our foreign relations. From April there will be four of these priorities (replacing the combination of ten policy and service priorities until now - no organisation can have ten priorities).

This thought was expanded in his article in The Times on 6 January. The FCO is going on a Diplomatic Surge. Instead of the previous ten Strategic Priorities the FCO now will have four 'key policy goals'.

Do I detect a wisp of 'thank goodness the grown-ups are in charge now and getting a grip on this collection of twerps who overloaded themselves with far too many priorities'?

The blog formulation is carefully worded. It was not the Government which erred in having too many foreign priorities - it was the organisation!

Yet don't I dimly recall that it was Ministers in this Government who made us draw up Strategic Priorities in the first place? Yes, it's all coming back ...

First we had seven.

Then we had eight.

Then we had nine.

Then, gloriously, we reached ten!

Now we are reduced to a measly four Key Policy Goals, albeit with free added Surge. All in some 260 weeks.

Each strategic change ordered, endorsed and indeed proudly announced by FCO Ministers themselves and supported unambiguously by Cabinet colleagues and the Prime Minister.

Each with laborious consultation processes around Whitehall to get 'buy-in' and then all sorts of attempts to rejig FCO internal structures and spending to fit everything neatly into one or other of these seven/eight/nine/ten/four boxes.

Each with diplomats at all levels fretting over forms allocating the time of every member of the FCO in miscroscopic percentages to each of the seven/eight/nine/ten/four Priorities/Goals, rather than just getting out there hard to promote British interests.

Crawford's First Law of Bureaucracy: The capacity of a Ministry to do anything useful strategically is in indirect proportion to the amount of time it spends preparing its strategies. 

A Yugoslav joke about the endless and pointless rearrangements of the communist self-management system by chief ideologue Kardelj.

Kardelj was asked how to cure a sick cow. He advised cooling it right down with ice-packs. The cow got worse.

He recommended heating it right up with blankets and electric fires. The cow got worse.

He recommended feeding it masses of extra food. The cow got worse.

He recommended starving it. The cow died.

"Boze boze, what a tragedy! I am a skilled vet and I had so many more cures to propose...!"

The Phaeton-like rise and fall of Bobby Fischer brings back memories of the Cold War.

It is hard to describe the surge of utter dominance and confidence which lifted Fischer to his World Chess Championship victory over Boris Spassky in 1972. Imagine (if you can) Tottenham winning the Premiership by 16 clear points, then beating every team in the Champions League 5-0 before beating Bayern Munich 6-2 in the semi-finals, and rounding it all off by thrashing Barcelona 9-3 in the final - after being 0-2 down after the first ten minutes. Then never playing another competitive match. That was Bobby Fischer’s chess career.

Latterly Fischer did little but rant against Jews and the United States in a strikingly vile way:  I'm very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction ... because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. ... I'm absolutely serious about that.

In his earlier playing days Fischer railed against officially-inspired Soviet chess machinations. We now know that he had a point. The book Russians versus Fischer draws on Party and KGB archives to describe all this in vivid detail. Grandmaster Taimanov was officially punished by the Soviet authorities for losing an unprecedented 0-6 to Fischer in his surge to the top. I recall veteran Grandmaster Yuri Averbach telling me how the Communist Party’s sports committee at one point had even tried to suppress certain sorts of theoretical chess studies for being too ‘bourgeois' and reactionary. Madness takes many forms.

Fischer has gone. But his games live on. Especially this legendary one. A towering intellectual achievement for anyone. Bobby Fischer was thirteen at the time.

In March 2007 it was drawn to my attention that the authors of a new book The Albanian Question – Reshaping the Balkans had said some most disobliging things about … me!

Thus I had been described as “ … a fanatical Yugophile, who had been a member of the Tony Blair orbit of law students at university”; success for the Albanians in Macedonia had been “a real defeat for the Crawford-Landsman group in London and their allies in the Whitehall bureaucracy”. (Note: David Landsman served with distinction to support democratic forces in Serbia from our Embassy in Belgrade and then in London during the turbulent and dangerous end of the Milosevic period, and later became HM Ambassador in Tirana.)

Needless to say, in doing their research the resourceful authors of this tome had not approached me to ask for my views on UK policy on the Balkans had unfolded, despite kindly describing me as a “key figure”. And they seemed to have unduly lurid ideas about how policy was devised in our system. But why let facts spoil a good Balkan-style yarn? Brendan Simms by contrast did a lot of detailed research for his much praised book on Bosnia and interviewed a lot of the people involved, including myself. He roasted British policy – intelligently. And duly sold quite a few copies. 

It is one thing to lambast British Government policy and the Ministers who lead it. But to denigrate the humble messenger thereof? Fie!

I could not bear the thought that in the pubs and salons and debating societies of the United Kingdom millions of people could be poring over this 'pioneering' and 'brilliant' book, concluding that I must be a horrible person. So I asked FCO HQ a couple of questions, really to see what would happen. Had I been libelled? And if so, would the FCO fund my libel suit as evidently I was being libelled in my official capacity?

Rather good answers came back. Yes, the passages in the book were clearly unpleasant and possibly defamatory. They arguably called into question my impartiality as a civil servant and perhaps hinted that I had been engaged in disloyal private scheming. But it did not look as though they had so undermined my reputation and authority so as to stop me doing my job or otherwise to cause me real damage. As for the FCO funding any libel action launched by one of its officers, that raised complicated questions given the way the libel laws worked in the UK…

So I sighed, shed a silent tear, and moved on, my reputation among all right-thinking Albanians and everyone else dented and scratched, but not wrecked beyond repair.

This book alas has not yet been reviewed on Amazon.co.uk. It now languishes at a scary 343,427th place in their sales rank list. 

Of course the vilest claim made against me in this book (and surely the reason for its dismal sales record) was that I had been a member of Tony Blair’s ‘orbit of law students’ (whatever that is) at university.

The Facts:

• I was at St John’s College, Oxford with Tony Blair – he a year ahead of me
• We did both read law, so we must have spent some time together in the small law library glumly mulling over snailtainted ginger-beer bottles and other such magnificent phenomena of British jurisprudence
• And we played in the St John’s football team together; I vividly recall a glorious Adonis-like run he made down the right wing
• But he was of the glamorous, middle-class, public school Cool Left. I was of the prosaic, petit-bourgeois Libertarian Right. 

Above all, I was not beautiful or sophisticated (or above all wealthy) enough to be part of his distinguished toxophilitic society.

So, Balkan authors. Calm down.

If you want to know my views, do what Brendan Simms did. Just ask nicely: mail@charlescrawford.biz

There are three problems in Diplomacy. What you think about a problem. What you should do about it. And what you can do about it.

So what the British Government think about the continuing Russian official pressure on the British Council is clear enough. But some commentators are saying that what they should - and can - do about it is perhaps another matter. We'll see.

This is one reason why wise diplomatists keep the language they use in public studiously calm. If someone is causing you a problem, do not appear rattled. For two reasons:

• You do not want the other side to think they are making progress by rattling you (and NB making you come across as rattled and therefore some sort of plaything they can manipulate at will in fact may be part of why they have caused the row in the first place. Mind games and all that)
• plus you may appear even weaker if there is a perceptible gap between your evident agitation and what you can do to make the other side back off or change course

Putting it another way, if someone is hurting you a tried and proven way to make them stop is to find a way to hurt them back (ideally a notch more than they are hurting you). This is the stuff of B-movie cliches, but none the less true for that.

Gangster A: "You can't do this to me!" 

Ganster B: (slowly and deliberately blowing smoke in Gangster A's eyes) "Whatcha gonna do about it, punk?"

Or as Lenin famously put it, "Who whom?" (Kto kogo?)