With the perverse and wrong-headed decision to sack three of his shadow ministers, and to accept the resignations of two more, for the offence of voting for Chuka Umunna’s amendment favouring Britain’s continued membership of...
How quickly the English commentariat forgets the recent past and glosses over inconvenient aspects of the present! The Guardian of 10 April 2017 published a slightly edited version of a letter from me of...
Until last weekend, the prime minister had one asset that she could have used to motivate other EU leaders to enter into preliminary discussions of the broad framework of Britain’s future relationship with the...
This is a postscript to my recent blog post at https://barder.com/4638, with new information. Not only is my book What Diplomats Do – The life and work of diplomats out now (May 2016) in affordable...
This is (obviously) a new post on my Ephems blog. This time it’s also an advertisement. My first (and only) book, What Diplomats Do: the life and work of diplomats, was published in the United...
After much soul-searching and wobbling, I have come to the conclusion that Britain ought to heed the call in UN Security Council resolution 2249 on countries with the capacity to do so to make...
The UN Security Council’s resolution on ISIL (ISIS, Da’esh), adopted unanimously on 20 November, has received much less UK media attention and analysis than it deserves. In my view it has transformed the situation...
Jeremy Corbyn was unwise and wrong to denounce the chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, for pointing out that nuclear deterrence ceases to have any effect if the head of government...
According to today’s Guardian, the statesman and Nobel peace prize winner Martti Ahtisaari has revealed what looks like a spectacular failure in Washington, London and Paris to respond to a Russian proposal in 2012...
It takes an ingenious lawyer to devise a legal justification for the execution by RAF drone strike last week of a UK citizen in Syria suspected – but never tried or convicted – of plotting...