12 November 2017
This event has moved me – OK, rather mischievously – to offer for adoption a new term in the style of our Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy:
laddish. Hitherto, ‘laddish’ meant only the kind of bad behaviour indulged in by young lads (boys) with weak social restraints. Recently, however, it has acquired a second meaning. It might also now be used to describe any private educational institution designed solely to make money from the award of degrees in diplomacy. It derives from ‘LAD’, the acronym of the late ‘London Academy of Diplomacy’. In stark contrast to the rightly respected Vienna Diplomatic Academy, such an institution is typically headed by an individual with at best only slender familiarity with the profession or the academic subject (and who might well be an agent of influence of a foreign power), and its courses are taught in the main by casually hired employees. Its degrees are validated by a respectable university that should know better, and it obtains superficial glamour from a prestigious address. When its guiding hands are exposed, it tends to disappear in a puff of smoke.