Category: “Foreign Policy”

Here is a piece I have done for The Guardian today. I sometimes wish we had patented “The Grid”, the scheduling tool New Labour developed in opposition and subsequently used in government to seek to bring order and strategy to a mass of often seemingly unrelated activities. These days, most major organisations and businesses have [...]

As David Cameron seemingly spends another weekend deciding whether, where and when to make his much vaunted speech on Europe … as the rest of us ponder the remarkable failure of leadership that has got him into a mess of his own making … as Ed Miliband rightly signals no truck with the idea of [...]

I was lucky enough to go last night to a preview of Lincoln, the new film about America’s greatest President. Immediate thoughts – Daniel Day Lewis nailed on for an Oscar, great decision by Spielberg to focus on a relatively short period of his political life, climaxing with the vote to abolish slavery, pleased it [...]

This blog comes courtesy of a friend of mine, Greg Nugent, who until recently was part of the London 2012 team under Seb Coe which helped deliver the best Olympic and Paralympic Games ever. It must be hard to know what to do next after an extraordinary experience like that, but Greg decided to get [...]

By an accident of timing, I was reading the latest of Robert Caro’s vast books on Lyndon Johnson on a flight yesterday, and reached the point where President Kennedy was assassinated, and Johnson had to step up. It is one of those books that makes you want a flight to go on and on, because [...]

I missed Little Lord Fauntleroy’s address to the faithful, but it appears I did not miss a new strategy for growth. So that’s two years in a row on that front, Gideon. It is heartening, however, to hear that despite being the most unpopular Chancellor since Norman Lamont, and the most incompetent Chancellor since, er, [...]

So, to the excellent question I was asked at a software conference yesterday – is David Cameron doing anything right, does Nick Clegg have a future, and is Ed Miliband electable as Prime Minister? I ended up answering yes, yes and yes, but with varying degrees of caveat and qualification. For Cameron, the problem I [...]

In so far as our Prime Minister impinges upon today’s Labour media monitoring unit analysis of the day’s papers, it is via the revelations that he is to appear on a well-known American chat show, and that he is to ‘take to twitter.’ One of Mr Cameron’s closest advisors – no names but he is [...]

Here is a piece the Telegraph asked to do on Mitt Romney’s latest balls-up, his stupid comments on ‘victim’ Americans, and anti-peace Palestinians. We could be reaching the point of no return for Mr R. S and M. Two vital ingredients of any political campaign. No, this is not yet another examination of the Fifty [...]

First, before getting onto the subject in the headline, a restatement of the basic message in my excessive tweets re last night’s Paralympics opening ceremony. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Danny Boyle’s Olympics ceremony made me proud to be British, and proud to be Northern. Last night’s made me proud to be a citizen of a country [...]