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As I write (mid-November) the final results of the US presidential election are not in, but we know enough to highlight some figures. With 66.7 million popular votes and counting, and with a lead of 6.5 percentage points over John McCain, Barack Obama won more popular votes than any other US [...]
My pre-new-year resolution for this diary entry is to resist the temptation to write about the credit crunch, global warming, the bankers, George Osborne, the Pope, the stock exchange, Governor Sarah Palin, the Daily Mail, the weather, Jonathan Ross, the flu epidemic or Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately I seem to have broken that resolution already. [...]
The 6 March 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books includes a magnificent demolition job in a review of the memoirs of that rascal of the far right, John Bolton, by the veteran retired international public servant, Sir Brian Urquhart. (Hat-tip: to Dr Lorna Lloyd at Keele, who alerted me to this review [...]
A friend and former colleague has set me a challenge that (probably recklessly) I can’t resist:
I would be interested in your view of 2 recent events involving Gordon Brown. The first is his reported reluctance to agree to the Tories’ request to be granted access to senior Whitehall officials as from early 2009 in accordance [...]
It looks as if YouTube and its owner, Google, may have come up with a revolutionary new idea that could save classical music from extinction in the digital internet age. If you have ever been moved by a string quartet, an opera aria or a cello concerto, you should give a warm welcome to the [...]
A lively debate is in progress over on Owen’s blog about leaks of sensitive government information and the best way to deal with them. With apologies for my cowardly reluctance to butt in to the latest exchange between Owen and Paulie, I just want to make some points that are easily overlooked in the current [...]
According to the BBC’s latest report,
The solicitor for the Home Office worker who leaked information [Christopher Galley] says he did it because it was material that was “important for the public to know”.
The problem is that Mr Galley’s ministers took a different view of what material needed to be made publicly available, and their view [...]
