Some disconnected thoughts on the present discontents: David Cameron’s merciless, if tiresomely and unnecessarily repetitive, dismembering of the prime minister in Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) over the latter’s obstinate refusal to admit to Labour’s plans for stiff future cuts in government capital spending has been widely remarked on. Gordon Brown’s apparent fixation with his [...]
In his statement in the house of commons on 10 June 2009, the prime minister set out a 5-point programme of possible constitutional reform: 1. Reform of the house of lords, with 80-100 per cent of the members elected. 2. Consultation on a written constitution. 3. Devolution of more power to local communities: e.g. local [...]
In a major Commons statement today (10 June 2009) introducing a national debate on constitutional reform, the prime minister included the system of elections to the House of Commons in his five constitutional topics for debate and possible reform: [L]ast year we published our review of the electoral system and there is a long-standing debate [...]
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 1991, at the end of the last of my African and Africa-related postings, going back to 1957. The full text of [...]
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 to Nigeria, my last African posting and the end of my involvement in African affairs which had begun in London in [...]
I had been almost persuaded by the relentless drum-beat of Guardian editorials and columns that Gordon Brown is finished and should step down now, if only so as not to prolong the party’s and the country’s agony — well, embarrassment, if not agony. Almost persuaded, but not quite. Following recent traumatic events — the resignations, [...]
