1. Tim Ireland is a terribly nice man who has pioneered political blogging.

2. Paul Staines is a vindictive muck-raker and a bit of a wanker.

3. Err…that’s it. But I think that’s enough.

Another sell-out for “The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer” last night took us past our 1,000th person to experience it. We are one week away from moving into the Arts Theatre in the West End and hopefully welcoming that many people every couple of days – a scary thought. Baroness Sarah Ludford, LibDem MEP and (relevantly) Vice Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Extraordinary Rendition was in the audience last night. So far I’ve seen three ex-British Ambassadors – and they’re only the ones I’ve noticed.

More good news – Marks and Spencers have joined Tesco in the boycott of Uzbek cotton, and instituted audit trails to check there isn’t any in their products. This really is amazing.

I know some of my friends will find this hard to accept, but this commercial boycott has come about because, faced with incontrovertible proof of the mass exploitation of children and slave workers, these major British companies have acted out of their own desire to behave ethically, not out of consumer, governmental or judicial pressure, because there hasn’t been any. Discuss.

Yesterday was Australia Day which meant I had to hurdle prone bodies to get around Shepherds Bush. I have been trying to get my Rectorial Address into the right format to publish it as a booklet on Lulu, but it’s technically beyond me. Any volunteers?

The ever formidable Brian Barder had posted a fascinated observation on the growing weirdness of US political culture. Here is an excerpt:

It’s sad because it’s another example of the steadily widening gulf between the political culture in the US and that in the rest of the west, exemplified by the Iraq war (leaving aside, if possible, the UK’s culpable complicity in it), the so-called “war on terror” and its implications for civil liberties, extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay, the role of religion, attitudes to capital punishment and the treatment of prisoners, demonstrative patriotism, and now the role of the US sub-prime market in bringing about the impending recession which will engulf the rest of us as well as the United States. Alas, it’s no longer the case that the rest of the civilised world looks to the US as its moral and political leader. And I fear that the causes of this ever-widening gulf go much deeper than just the consequences of the catastrophic presidency of G W Bush: whoever succeeds him will not be able to build a durable bridge across it. Many of us small-L liberals used to feel that we had more in common with our American cousins than with our historical enemies just across the English Channel, the French and the Germans, and even our slightly more distant historical friends, the Scandinavians and the Dutch. I don’t think that’s true any more.

http://www.barder.com/ephems/754

The whole is well worth reading. Barack Obama leaves me stone cold too. I think we underestimate how different and dangerous the US now is. Last year I delivered a talk on Central Asia at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As I sat preparing my lecture, I had the television on low in my hotel room because I don’t like complete silence. Gradually I found myself listening intently to an evangelical preacher, telling his TV congregation that they should not worry about casualties in Iraq because the Bible showed us that there had to be a great and bloody conflict in the Middle East before the Second Coming of Christ. So the more people who died in these wars, the closer we are to Jesus.

Now that message would be acceptable to very few people in the UK – just Tony Blair and his immediate friends, really. I related this astonishing thing I had heard to some American lecturers over lunch. They told me that at least a third of their students would believe this stuff. And this was Ann Arbor, not the Deep South. It is essential that we all wake up now to the fact that the US is a deeply disturbed and psychotic society, and by far the biggest danger to world peace.

I can’t get past Typekey to post comments and dialogue, and I gather others are having the same problem. Hopefully we’ll get it fixed, but meantime if anyone wants their comment published, email me at [email protected], and I’ll post them up as a weblog entry.

The New Statesman published this article by me:

Drink, dictators and belly dancers

Craig Murray

Published 10 January 2008

I confess that, for me, the festive season passes in a kind of benign blur. As I have never driven, this has limited capacity to hurt anyone else. A friend just suggested to me that, as a good Scot, I shall still be hungover from Hogmanay when people are reading this. Actually, as a good Scot, I shall still be drinking when you are reading this.

I am thoroughly fed up with the anti-alcohol propaganda on every broadcast news programme at this time of year. Look at George W Bush. As a wealthy alcoholic, he was a relatively harmless parasite on society. Then he sobered up, found God, and killed millions. Leave alcohol alone – it does much less harm than religion.

A troubled conscience

I am sitting typing this in Accra, where I have been helping out with an emergency power generation project. One little-remarked consequence of climate change has been unpredictable rainfall patterns, which have adversely affected hydroelectric schemes. The consequences for Ghana, which until the recent problems got most of its electricity from hydro, have been dire. Last year power shortages caused an estimated 30 per cent drop in industrial production.

A large part of the long-term solution must lie in windfarms along the Atlantic coastline, but Ghana desperately needs power now, so we are looking to get additional gas-turbine generation up and running by next summer. Obviously this troubles my environmental conscience, but I prioritise the urgent needs of a society that has struggled successfully for poverty alleviation and genuine democracy. Both sets of gains could be threatened if the power crisis is sustained. Do I worry I am wrong? Yes.

In December 2008 the respected president, John Kufuor, will step down and I am delighted by the selection of my good friend Nana Akufo-Addo as the ruling party’s presidential candidate. Nana Addo is a great freedom fighter who struggled at great personal cost against military dictators from Acheampong to Rawlings. We are rightly quick to acknowledge as heroes those who struggled against colonial and white rule, but seldom recognise those who make the often much lonelier struggle against Africa’s own dictators.

Meantime in Uzbekistan, my old adversary President Karimov is re-elected with 88 per cent of the vote on a 90 per cent turnout. The opposition parties in Uzbekistan are all banned, and the four other “candidates” had all declared their support for Karimov. The fact that Russia praised the election is more evidence that you don’t have to be a right-wing hawk to worry about Putin. But against that must be set the way no amount of googling turns up a word of condemnation from the British government.

Our earlier support for Karimov as part of the “war on terror” is well documented, not least by me. The same philosophy in Pakistan has left our policy in a disastrous mess following the appalling assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Hearing the UK and US drone on about the need for democracy, after enthusiastically backing the military dictator Pervez Musharraf for years, makes me sick. I am least of all impressed by Washington’s sartorial test of democracy. Islam Karimov has never worn a uniform but is still a dictator. Musharraf has never been elected and remains a dictator, even if he dons a tutu.

Romantic progress

My partner, Nadira, joined me in Ghana for Christmas and we spent most of our time rehearsing for her one-woman show, The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer, playing at the Arcola Theatre in London throughout January. The show is autobiographical, and Nadira’s is a remarkable story of the degradation we have inflicted on Uzbekistan, and the ability of the spirit to rise above it. Less profoundly, in the second half it casts an entirely different light on some of the events I describe in Murder in Samarkand, as Nadira moves from romantic interest to protagonist. Nadira is searingly honest, and I don’t always look well in this new light. But the play addresses bigger issues than my vanity, and should be a tremendous theatrical experience.

Craig Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002-2004. His book “Murder in Samarkand” is published by Mainstream (£7.99)

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801100008

As usual my copy was slightly edited for length, but I feel the choice of this sentence to cut was interesting: “Benazir Bhutto inherited all her family’s qualities of physical courage, personal charisma and rapacious veniality”. I am extremely sorry she was assassinated, but a candidate for sainthood she is not. Worth remembering, especially given the new prominence of her horrible husband.

Thanks to Andrew for keeping the blog going while I have been hors de combat for a while. First I arrived in Ghana a week before Christmas and discovered my laptop had died. Then project problems meant I unexpectedly stayed there three weeks instead of one. I got back to the UK just in time for the blitz of launching Nadira’s play at the Arcola. Oh, and I got malaria (again).

Normal service will now be resumed, barring further disaster.

An extremely busy media day yesterday as given in the entries below, with Nadira in the Sunday Times (which has had a wonderful reaction) and a review (albeit hostile) of my book in the New York Times, while an article by me appeared in the Mail on Sunday, on our Embassies’ apparent inability to help people abroad. You can find that here

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=500633&in_page_id=1770

I am pleased to say the comments so far all agree with me!

I thought I’d post the original longer version:

Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi are to be wholeheartedly thanked and congratulated for their effort of unconventional diplomacy, which succeeded in persuading Sudan’s obnoxious government to release Gillian Gibbons. But what about conventional diplomacy, our Ambassador and his Embassy, maintained in Khartoum with a British staff much larger than that available to General Gordon. Why could conventional diplomacy and the Foreign Office not obtain her release?

Through many crises affecting Britons abroad ?” including the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the tragic case of Ken Bigley ?” the question of the Foreign Office’s performance keeps coming in for criticism. So much so, that the question is now being raised, by Lord Wallace among others, as to whether Britons abroad should be able to expect the protection of their Embassy. The arguments run that there are more countries than their used to be, some 15 million Britons living abroad and huge numbers travelling, including to pretty well every once obscure corner. Is it time for the FCO to stop pretending to offer consular protection?

There is no doubt that the picture is not good. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, British citizens had been evacuated to the horror and squalor of the Superdome stadium, where thousands of people were crowded among what the BBC described as “knee-high piles of faeces”. After the roads in to New Orleans had become again passable, a British Consulate convoy set out to pick them up. Reaching a checkpoint, they were told they were not allowed to enter without a permit from the Governor of Louisiana. Our intrepid diplomats turned back.

Ten minutes later the Australian consul had arrived. Told he had to turn back, he replied “Are you going to shoot me?” and drove through the roadblock, the Southern Cross flying proudly from his bonnet. . The Australians got out their own people and some of ours. When the British finally arrived at the stadium two days later, having gone through the paper hoops like good little bureaucrats, they found they had almost no-one left to rescue, most of the Britons having been helped out by journalists.

It is an attitude I sadly recognise from my own twenty years in the Diplomatic Service, which is nowadays characterised by lack of initiative, dedication to bureaucracy, clock-watching and an excessive aversion to the slightest personal risk. That of course extended beyond consular activity.

In Tashkent I was under instruction never to travel anywhere, except in an ex-Northern Ireland Police Land Rover bolted over with plate armour, leaving just window slits. That would have made it impossible to mix freely with the local people and move around without fuss. Nor was I supposed to travel into the mountainous border regions, which were the very place we needed to know what is happening.

Of course I ignored these instructions. The FCO constantly burbles on about its “Duty of Care” to its employees, which is much more important than their effective performance of their job. But can we really expect diplomats to live with the risk level of accountants?

I would be the last to argue that British people abroad are always deserving. I am writing from Ghana where two sixteen year old British girls, Yasemin Vatansever and Yatunde Diya, await sentencing for attempting to smuggle six kilos of cocaine. I can see no doubt that they are guilty, and that they received a fair trial. I once tried to go to the aid at midnight of a British citizen who had been arrested in Poznan, Poland. He was accused of sexual assault on a girl in the Poznan Hotel.

He worked for a big name merchant bank in London. After speaking to the Polish police and persuading them to release his arms, which were handcuffed behind his back, I asked him what had happened. He replied:

“Listen here you little shit. I earn more than a month than you’ll see in a lifetime. Now get me out of here, or I’ll make sure it’s the end of your career.”

I motioned to the police to lock him up again. Sadly I believe he did eventually succeed in buying his way out of prosecution.

So I have absolutely no starry-eyed view of some of the reasons British citizens get in trouble abroad. But equally I have no doubt about rejecting the idea that we should not regard consular protection as an absolute priority. The first duty of any state is the protection of its citizens. That is why they accept its authority and pay their taxes. The FCO needs to accept that, and to raise its game in this regard. Everywhere in the World we need to make sure British citizens are well treated and free from abuse, given a fair trial where appropriate, and receive patient assistance for genuine need.

Sadly the culture of British Embassies has to become ever more isolated and inward looking. That is not just my perception. The Conservative Party’s Ben Rogers this week published an excellent article on the Conservative Home website entitled “The Foreign Office has a what can I not do for you today culture.” It gives numerous examples of flagrantly unhelpful behaviour by our Embassies, he characterises the FCO attitude as “reactive, unimaginative, uncreative, unidealistic, inflexible, rigidity”.

A recently retired senior diplomat, Carne Ross, in his book “Independent Diplomat” says the FCO has “A culture of amorality”. I would put the same point another way ?” most FCO employees just don’t care. This came home to me most strongly in the FCO when I failed to persuade an officer in our Embassy in Switzerland to leave a dinner party and open up the Embassy at night to quickly issue an emergency passport to a mother whose daughter was in intensive care in Manchester after a car crash. The passport was given the next day, and the woman reached the hospital less than an hour after her daughter died.

This negative culture is reinforced by the government. FCO management continuously emphasise the EU working time directive and discourage staff from working outside office hours. Just as with the NHS, a massive and ever-increasing proportion of FCO resources are sacrificed to internal administration. This has reached ludicrous levels as New Labour is ever more in thrall to the cult of managerialism, and determined to stamp out local initiative.

The FCO has about a dozen key objectives. Every member of staff in an Embassy has to work out what percentage of their working time is devoted to achieving each objective. If you have a member of support staff, who works for several officers, they have an incredibly complex calculation, depending on the percentage of their time dedicated to each officer they support, related to the differing percentages each of those officers spend on each objective. This is a Yes Minister nightmare which is hard to understand, let alone do.

But that is only the start. You then have to calculate the amount of floor space of the Embassy dedicated to each objective, by working out what percentage of which areas are used by which staff, and what percentage of those staff are used for each objective.

This incredible exercise can paralyse an Embassy for weeks, and is just one of many such management exercises. No wonder they don’t have time to help British citizens.

Nor are our resources in the right place. The European Union contains massively more British diplomats than any other region. Despite the fact that the government claims to be emphasising Asia and Africa, the percentage of diplomatic resources deployed in those areas has fallen steadily over the last ten years.

We maintain massive Embassies in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and throughout the EU, situated in vast expensive palaces. Yet the function of these Embassies has greatly shrunk with the advent of the EU, which has subsumed much of the traditional diplomatic function.

Twenty years ago, if we wanted to discuss widgets with the Austrians, our ministry of widgets would have sent a message to the FCO, who would have sent a message instructing the Embassy First Secretary in charge of widgets to go into the Austrian Foreign Ministry and talk with their widget man. The Austrian foreign ministry would then send a report to their ministry of widgets.

Nowadays, the British and Austrian ministry of widget experts will have a close working relationship, and meet in meetings in Brussels at least once a month. In between, they email and phone each other. Not only would they never think any more of communicating via Embassies and Foreign Ministries, they have fallen out of the habit of even copying in the FCO on what is happening.

You can substitute the word widget with fish, aviation, food safety, regional development or pretty well any field of government, and that analysis will remain true. The large bulk of the function of our Embassies in EU countries has vanished. And yet those Embassies have grown, not shrunk, and contain a disproportionate number of our most senior diplomats.

I don’t imagine we will ever convince the FCO that more of our top diplomats need to be in the World’s troublespots, rather than in places with good opera and easy access to Cannes and Aspen. British embassies suffer a whole battery of malaises ?” an uncaring culture, social isolation from British communities, excessive management workload and irrational distribution of resources ?” which make them of little and decreasing use to the British abroad, be they businessmen or citizens in trouble. It will take a fundamental shift of institutional culture to change this.