Peter Cardwell is a former special adviser to two secretaries of state for Northern Ireland.
On the 23rd anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement, it’s safe to say celebrations here in Northern Ireland will be muted at best. Over the past ten days, hundreds of rioters wielding bricks, bottles, stones and petrol bombs in Belfast have injured more than 70 police officers, most notably in the west of
As a number of top civil servants take shelter from the ‘hard rain’ Dominic Cummings has forecast for Whitehall, it’s unsurprising one feline has also taken the opportunity to announce his retirement. It’s fair to say my friends and former colleagues who work at the Foreign Office are much sadder to see the back of
Rod Liddle is spot on about John le Carré (8 December). I’ve long held the view that life is too short to read or watch another le Carré. Your erstwhile columnist Hugo Rifkind put it brilliantly when he wrote of le Carré in these pages in 2011: ‘Single bars burning on three-bar fires; men who
