Some random jottings about current happenings: I was slightly disconcerted this morning, lying in bed half-asleep with the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on in the background, suddenly to hear my own voice for...
J and I are still reeling from the effects of the film Katyn, the latest product of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and indisputably a masterpiece. Watching it is a gruelling experience, but...
Perhaps at last something buried deep in the so-called middle east peace process is beginning to stir. First the doggedly right-wing and famously obstinate Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the first time accepts...
With the agreement of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, I have put on my website the text of a confidential despatch that I sent to the then Conservative Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary in early...
Note: This is the text of a despatch to the then Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, Douglas Hurd, which I sent in January 1991 shortly before the end of my posting as British High Commissioner...
I have expressed earlier my conviction that it will turn out to be a disaster for Britain if the Tories, having won the general election in a few months’ time, carry out their threat...
One of the strongest of many reasons for not voting Conservative in the European Parliament elections on 4 June or, especially, in the impending general election is the Tory threat to hold a referendum...
The dry statistics of unemployment figures tend to mask the human suffering that lies behind them: men and women losing the jobs that helped to define them, in some cases with little prospect of...
Joanna Lumley (pictured below with the much-decorated Gurkha veteran and holder of the Victoria Cross, Tul Bahadur Pun VC) describes on the Gurkha Justice Campaign website the campaign for a decent deal for former...
All the press loves a crisis: it sells papers. The Opposition loves a crisis: it attributes it to the government’s failure — sometimes correctly, sometimes not. The masochistic British in general are easily convinced...