Category: “Foreign Policy”

Following my blog on Mitt Romney appointing Paul Ryan as his running mate, TIME magazine asked me to write a piece for their international edition. Here it is. To win a campaign, you have to make the weather. It is one of my golden rules. But whereas the real weather is measurable to the last [...]

This is not hindsight speaking, because I said at the time of John McCain’s appointment of Sarah Palin as his running mate that it was ‘tactically brilliant, strategically disastrous.’ I have said it many times since, as The McCain-Palin blunder is one of my favourite case studies when out and about talking on why strategy [...]

I must admit to being a bit grouchy with Random House publicity for getting me up for another early start in order to spend much of the morning as a panellist on Channel 5′s The Wright Stuff. I am not a daytime telly kind of person … Yet I really enjoyed it, not least because [...]

Based on a passage in my diary (clearly missed by The Guardian who serialised Burden of Power last week) The IoS has splashed with ‘How Blair misled Cabinet on Iraq.’ The Guardian were right to miss it first time round. I went into rebuttal mode with reporter Jane Merrick on twitter, pointing out that the [...]

To be fair to Rupert Murdoch – you don’t hear that too often these days – News International were right to say last night that ‘there isn’t any evidence in Alastair Campbell’s diaries’ that ‘ he was pressing Tony Blair on Iraq on behalf of the Republicans. Nor, to be fair to me, have I [...]

I was in Paris for part of the aftermath of former Presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s spectacular fall. The mood in the Parti Socialiste at the time was one of real anxiety, for all the considerable unpopularity of President Sarkozy. DSK had looked like a shoo in not just for the candidature but for the Presidency. [...]

By Joe Hewitt “Sometimes it is hell on the streets but when I play football I feel as if I’m in heaven.” Thamires, Brazil. Football is accessible even to those who have the least in this world, providing street children around the globe with fun, hope, companionship and confidence for a brighter future away from [...]

If, as is being widely suggested, Francois Hollande wins the French elections, and Nicolas Sarkozy becomes a rare, single-term President, there are one or two lessons David Cameron might try to draw on … once he has repaired the damage done to Anglo-French relations by effectively endorsing Sarko. The main lesson relates to hyperactivity. When [...]

I just did a short interview on Five Live on the fall-out (literally in the case of relations between Britain and Italy) from the failed attempt to rescue two hostages in Nigeria. I was preceded by an Italian politician who was venting her spleen at David Cameron’s failure to consult his Italian opposite number until [...]

Yes that was me tweeting in German last night, digging into my modern languages education to remember all I could, and surprised how much that was. Truth is, as I am about to say to a conference in Berlin when I speak in English, French is the dominant foreign language in my head, and when [...]