Some lunches end with coffee in the drawing room; others finish with a brandy on the terrace. But the final course of my lunch with Mikheil Saakashvili is taking place in a Dolphin helicopter, speeding towards a military base in the middle of Georgia.

President Saakashvili – affable over lunch on a terrace in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital – is ebullient once up in the air. As we lean back on our black leather seats, he puts on a CD at top volume: it is Charles Aznavour singing “Je N’ai Rien Oublié”. French is one of the many languages the president speaks and besides – he informs me – Aznavour is of Georgian origin.

Gesturing towards the countryside – and shouting to make himself heard over the helicopter blades and the Aznavour – Saakashvili says that if I look to my right I will see South Ossetia, a Georgian territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists. “We don’t want to fly too close to there,” he laughs. “The last time I did that, they shot a missile at my helicopter.” Continue reading "Lunch with the FT: Mikheil Saakashvili" »

You will be glad to know that the weather is beautiful in Paris. But the outlook is cloudy with showers for Nicolas Sarkozy.

I was here this time last year, on the eve of Sarko’s election. Almost a year later, all that hope and expectation has all but evaporated. A poll last week showed that 72 per cent of French people now have an unfavourable view of Sarkozy’s presidency. This is an astonishing achievement. It took Chirac more than a decade in office to achieve similar levels of unpopularity.

Sarkozy gave a long interview on television last night to try and repair some of the damage. He argued that reforming the French economy was always going to be difficult - and would inevitably piss off important interest groups. (A loose translation, obviously). This seems plausible enough to me. But I think that some of the problems of his presidency are more personal than that. The furore over his personal life has obviously hurt him - and he tried to draw a line under it last night. But in a broader sense, Sarko seems a bit unpresidential. While Chirac spoke slowly in a deep voice and sat very still, Sarko gets visibly agitated and seems fidgety and angry when put under pressure. Continue reading "Sarkozy at bay" »

Brace yourself for the wave of 1968 nostalgia that will hit us next month - the anniversary of the May events in Paris. All those soixante-huitards will be strutting their stuff in the papers. Who knows Le Monde may even consent to start publishing again?

Well I’m not a soixante-huitard - more like a soixante-dix huitard. And I’m pleased to see that we 1978ers are also getting our small moment of nostalgic glory. This weekend they are re-staging the famous (well, quite famous) “Rock Against Racism” concert that took place in Victoria Park in Hackney in 1978. There was a big article last weekend in the Observer about the original concert.

I finally managed to impress my daughter by informing her that I had been at the original concert back in 1978. She is 14 - the same age as I was in 1978 - and is planning to go to the re-union concert this weekend. (I have been forbidden from coming along, even though I would quite like to.)

Continue reading "1968 v 1978" »

Why is the American presidential election such compelling viewing? Because it combines the formats of the games show, the talent contest, the television series and the sporting contest.

The early rounds of the primary elections have a structure that closely resembles The Weakest Link. We start with a large field of candidates. They are asked lots of questions on television. Then, one by one, the worst performers are eliminated.

The Weakest Link is one of the gentler games shows. As the election grinds onwards, it takes on aspects of some of the more desperate and humiliating talent contests, such as Girlicious and American Idol.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia seem to have ratcheted up a couple of notches, with the story that the Russians have shot down a Georgian drone.

The Georgians are already very anxious about what they regard as further steps in Russia’s “creeping annexation” of the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On April 16th, the Russians announced that they are opening “representations” in the two territories, to deal directly with Russian citizens there. David Smith of the Georgian Security Analysis centre in Tbilisi argues that - “This is big—tantamount to Russian annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

But - as Smith makes clear - the Georgians are pleased with what they regard as a firm western response. The secretary-general of Nato, Condi Rice, John McCain and Hillary Clinton have all spoken out in support of Georgia.

The whole argument highlights the debate about how to handle an angry and resurgent Russia. The “anti-appeasement” crowd will argue that Russia has been encouraged by the refusal to grant Georgia a membership action plan at the Nato summit - and that current developments are an example of Russia testing western resolve. The “understand Russia” crowd will argue that the Kremlin is responding to western provocation over Kosovo - as well as Ukraine and Georgia.

And what do you think?

The British papers this week have been contemplating the death of Joan Hunter Dunn - who was the muse who inspired that most English of poets, John Betjeman.

But never mind Betjeman. I have just come across something that struck me as quintessentially English, on the website of the Cambridge University Philosophy department. It is the biography of one of the members of the faculty, John Marenbon. The full version is here. But let me just highlight the first paragraph and a half: Continue reading "The full English" »

What is the cure for anti-Americanism in Europe? I have always thought that there is a one-word answer to that question - China.

And so it has come to pass. The FT-Harris poll released this week shows that a narrow majority of Europeans now regard China as the biggest threat to global stability - ahead of the United States. Of course, these kind of polls always reflect recent events. So the news out of Tibet - and, to a lesser extent, Darfur - will have hurt China’s image. Meanwhile the decline in coverage of the Iraq war - and the fact that the Bush administration is winding down - will help the US. Continue reading "Fear of China, fear of America" »

Three more books arrived today. I shouldn’t let this get me down. Obviously, in many ways it’s a very nice aspect of my job that I keep being sent interesting new books - for free. But the pile of unread tomes on my desk is a bit lowering.

One of the British Sunday papers has a quiz that includes the question “what percentage of the books on your shelves have you actually read?” My answer has always been - “about 50%” - and even that is probably charitable. But with new books arriving all the time, my hit rate is going down fast.

The three that arrived today are “Fidel Castro, My Life” (Penguin) by - well - Fidel Castro; “The Powers to Lead”  (Oxford) by Joseph Nye - he of “soft power” fame. And “In Sickness and in Power” (Methuen) - a tome by David Owen, a former British foreign secretary and doctor, about people who fell ill when in power. I have put all three on the pile and I look at them occasionally - and they look back at me, reproachfully. Continue reading "Books I haven’t read" »

In Winston Churchill’s memoirs, he records a meeting with Stalin in October 1944: “The moment was apt for business, so I said ‘Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans… So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 per cent of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?’ While this was being translated, I wrote out the percentages on a half-sheet of paper. I pushed this across to Stalin… There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.”

I was in Georgia – Stalin’s birthplace – last week. The country regained its independence in 1991. But its leaders fear that they may yet be subject to a modern version of the Churchill-Stalin percentages deal – in which the west casually assigns Georgia into Moscow’s “sphere of influence”.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

I am delighted by this comment from “Paskalis” (a relative newcomer to the blog). So much so that I am lifting it out of the comments section on the Georgia post and giving it its very own entry.

I feel it would serve as an excellent epitaph for me. If there is not enough room on my tombstone for the entire comment, then I would accept just the second sentence:

“Your comments and insights are thoughtful, insightful and intelligent and have as much weight as a ripe banana on this planet of the apes.

“You have turned geopolitics into a parlour game for the enfeebled while the men are in another room smoking their cigars.”