Alastair's Blog

No cliche is being left unturned to emphasise the Prime Minister’s determination to kickstart the sluggish economy. He is straining every sinew. He has found his passion (er … again). He is on an all-out mission. He is tackling red tape. Unblocking the system. He has an ‘obsession’ with ‘shovel-ready’ projects. He is determined to [...]

Perth in Western Australia is a lovely place, but I suspect David Cameron wishes the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting could have been held in the equally lovely Scottish namesake. No matter how wonderful Australia may be, it is a long long way away, and the PM was unsurprisingly looking a bit tired I thought. [...]

The mood music out of the eurozone crisis summit was pretty good, the reactions not bad, and so the sense is of disaster averted. The problem is that further difficult steps now have to be taken, and what happens when they are is far from certain. Europe’s leaders have laid down what should happen, but [...]

To the PR Week awards last night, to present 31 trophies, the first of which received one of the loudest cheers of the night. Some of the judges were worried that their peers would not quite understand why football manager Ian Holloway was being so honoured – indeed Mr Holloway himself felt the same – [...]

You’d have thought President Sarkozy would still have been in post-Libya mutual backslap mode with Dave, added to which a new baby usually puts a man in a good mood for a few days. So our PM must really have been getting Sarko’s goat to provoke the tirade that came his way at the European [...]

I promise I am not going soft, but I am beginning to feel a little bit sorry for David Cameron and George Osborne. As a regular attendee of European summits when Labour was in power, I always feel a bit sorry for anyone who has to eat into the weekend to go to some soulless [...]

Just back from a run round still dark but very clean and pretty Oslo. My hotel is opposite the government buildings where on July 22 a bomb ripped through the heart of the city, in part as a decoy for the even bigger massacre to come at the Labour Party summer camp in Utoya. You [...]

The post has just arrived and in it a very nice surprise, the discovery that Jacques Seguela, one-time adviser to President Mitterrand, now close confidant of President and Madame Sarkozy (indeed he intoduced them), and something of a legend in French political communications, has dedicated his latest book to little old moi. With apologies for [...]

Despite doing all this blogging, tweeting, Facebooking malarkey, I remain something of a technophobe. Though I am regularly introduced when speaking as being ‘at the cutting edge of communication’ I am likely to be using scribbled notes, and have never used Power Point. ‘Power corrupts, Power Point corrupts absolutely’ usually raises a chuckle. As Patrick [...]

It will not have escaped most people’s notice that despite Labour being out of power, its senior figures continue to be held accountable whether via public inquiries, a media that sometimes seems to think we are still there, and a government that never misses an opportunity to paint a negative picture of a very successful [...]