1950s diplomacy! The tremendous drinker George Brown launches insults with a chaser from Gaitskell and Bevan. Khrushchev concludes it's more difficult to discuss things with Labour than the Conservative government.
Always keep a hold of Eden, for fear of finding something worse.
I didn’t have a view of Simon Case until today — difficult job, difficult choices. But has there been such a flaky Cabinet Secretary? Think of Hankey, or Armstrong, Trend, O’Donnell, and compare their work to the cynical WhatsApp messages sent by Case to ‘Matt Hancock’.
Who would write such things, joking about locking people up and Premier Inn rooms, at a time of national mourning? I can’t imagine Norman Brook indirectly facilitating an unsecured £.8 million soft loan for the prime minister while he was in office. What has the UK come to?
This is fine but how about appointing an Ambassador (a person, not a car)? Must be two years and counting since the US has had proper representation in India. Wither diplomacy.
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It would be great to have some more Betty Boothroyds, Barbara Castles, even Margaret Thatchers in the Commons now. You have to go back in time to look for such political and social talent.
A terrible policy. How can a 15-year-old be made stateless on the grounds they have an attachment to a country they have not visited? It encourages them to become a hungry ghost wandering the borderlands where the only option is to join up with criminals. theguardian.com/uk-news/2023…
So many brilliant dramatic adaptations by Michael Bakewell. Has any writer had more successful radio plays over the years? It probably would not have occurred to Joan Bakewell in the 1960s that he would prove a more enduring playwright than Pinter. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002c…
Omai was the first South Pacific ambassador to come to Britain, with Captain James Cook in 1774. Reynolds did the stunning full-length portrait at the NPG. How can this beautiful piece of social-political-diplo-artistic history be up for grabs? theguardian.com/commentisfre…
Shoshana Zuboff —“Our information spaces must exist under public law and be governed by democratic institutions ... we will look back on the days of the information oligarchs like Musk and Zuckerberg as the first primitive missteps of a new civilisation.” ft.com/content/0cca6054-6fc9…
The murder of Patrice Lumumba is one of the creepiest stories of Europe’s colonial unravelling. Learn of “one gold-capped tooth in a padded box,” kept in Belgium. Ludo de Witte told me about this 10 years ago, and now some sort of restitution has occurred. ft.com/content/eca1ba35-aa02…
Our @ahmedabad neighbour the architect BV Doshi has passed at the age of 95. I admire his stylish low-cost urban buildings, though he stood behind many eminent structures too. Doshi was an exemplar. India’s best adaptation and indigenisation of modernism happened in architecture.
Amazing words from Hanif Kureishi on the collaboration and respect found in a hospital gym. “If you only watch the news and tv shows, you would have the impression that the world is only a harsh place, inhabited by money-grubbing and narcissistic individuals.” @hanifkureishi
Showing some temerity, Gideon Rachman comes out against the neologism of 2022 — ‘polycrisis’.
But if not polycrisis, what? 2020s geopolitics + climate crisis has created a different threat to anything that came before in human history and needs a new conceptual framework.
Patrick French retweeted
Astonishing scenes as a Kabul university professor destroys his diplomas on live TV in Afghanistan —
“From today I don’t need these diplomas anymore because this country is no place for an education. If my sister & my mother can’t study, then I DON’T accept this education.” – at Hounslow, London
Patrick French retweeted
The relative media & online silence around the Kurds murdered in #Paris by a man known to be racist & formerly violent towards immigrants is so loud right now.
Was Roy Plumley in his pomp ever as deferential as Lauren Laverne is today? We don't have to go back to the style of Sue Lawley to have at least an ounce of grit in a Desert Island Discs interview. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ghv…