Neil Durkin

The other day I called a plumber to plug a leak in the kitchen we didn’t have. Before that I took my car to the garage to get them to check out an engine noise I couldn’t hear. Yes, and today I read that Justice Secretary Ken Clarke...

You don’t set ‘artificial’ deadlines on troop withdrawal because that will let the Taliban know how long they have to keep fighting . For years this has been the mantra from Hoon, Reid, Browne, Hutton and co, but now that seems to have...

At the time of writing it’s not clear whether today’s Obama-Netanyahu meeting in Washington will see a joint statement and photo-opportunity in the White House’s Rose Garden . Last time, of course, there wasn’t. Instead Netanyahu was...

Systematic failings from the police over investigating a series of rapes and sexual offences perpetrated by a sexual predator in a car – the Kirk Reid case has an unpleasantly familiar ring. Yes – it’s like the John Worboys case , the...

If in Britain we’d recently had major unrest with hundreds – possibly thousands – of people killed in apparently ethnically-motivated bloodletting, I don’t think we’d have conducted a polite referendum on the constitution within a...

As regular readers of this blog will know – both of them! – the topic of Israel and Palestine has a marked tendency to polarise opinion (see Sebastian and Alex’s epic, Wimbledon tennis-like exchange in the comment thread for a recent...

No longer run by the mad dog of Tripoli (in Ronald Reagan’s infamous phrase ) but by a “reformed” Muammar Gaddafi, an elder statesman of the Middle East, Libya has recently been rebranding itself. To put it mildly, Libya used to have...

As I’m sure you noticed, the media coverage of the recent execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, USA was unusually extensive. A casual observer might have thought “Right. This must be a big thing”, but in actual fact it was just the...

Imagine, like poor Alan Bennett, you’re the victim of a street theft. Someone accosts you, tricks you and steals all your money. You’d be shaken up. You might feel a fool, thinking you’re even partly responsible. Self-reproachingly...

In the aftermath of the England-USA goalkeeper debacle, I was sitting in a pub reading match reports on my phone, thinking … how far removed the Kyrgyzstan crisis felt from all the World Cup chat. (BTW, if you thought I had something...

Last December we were told that President Obama had phoned his counterpart the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to congratulate him on the country’s military offensive against rebels in and around al-Ma'jalah, in the Abyan area of...

As the heated debate (including on this blog ) over Israel’s interdiction of the Gaza aid convoy has shown, there are two sides to every story. (Or in some cases about 38). With claim and counter-claim over the nature of Israel’s...

Yet again the Israel-Palestinian conflict has thrown out a challenge to the world. How to respond to what appears to have been a heavy-handed storming of the Gaza aid convoy by Israeli commandos? Not for the first time, the UN has...

I’m not sure it’s entirely fashionable to say so these days, but I’m a big fan of reading. Reading books . When I’m not “building networks on social media”, in my spare time I like to plough through off-puttingly large novels, the...

… and like “Mr Smith” in the Capra film classic , he takes on the vested interests of the Washington political machinery and undergoes a personal transformation in the process. He comes back home a wiser, sadder man, but one who has...

Hundreds of prisoners held without charge or trial by the United States on “security” grounds in a remote and inaccessible military camp without access to lawyers or the courts. Where have we heard that before? Guantánamo, right? No...

It is, as they say, all very fluid. The Lib Dems + Conservatives? A Lib-Lab pact? Tories plus the Democratic Unionist Party? David Cameron, Caroline Lucas and Amnesty International? OK, I made that last one up. That’s right, Amnesty...

As the (appropriately-named) Sun reports today, a senior Russian leader’s claim that he was abducted by aliens is … well, unusual . Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, has been on TV in Russia saying...

I’m not, as the old cliché has it, a betting man (no, no, I’m really not a betting man, hate it …) but …isn’t that Paddy Power bet where you can try to guess which is the first country mentioned in the leaders’ debate wide open to...

Wow. We’ve gone from Britain being an ash-infested no-fly-zone, to British airspace opening up again, even for planes from that former no-fly-zone – Iraq. The fact that a passenger flight flew from Bahgdad to Britain for the first time...