Mary Dejevsky

One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.

Mary Dejevsky: Cash-machine man in need of withdrawal

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I have arrived at the local cash-machine to find no one there. And by no one, I don't just mean there's no queue, although there isn't. I mean that there is no one lingering, lurking, sitting, lying, sleeping or otherwise occupying the space between the door of the NatWest bank and the door of the Costcutter store where the machine is sited.

Recently by Mary Dejevsky

Mary Dejevsky: Yes we can! (Slash the budget deficit, that is)

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Once you begin to look, the cuts just start rolling in

Mary Dejevsky: Planning law, as seen from my window

Friday, 13 November 2009

From my study window in our seventh-floor flat, I can see: red tiled roofs into the distance, red chimney pots on which pigeons and squawking seagulls compete for space, a grid of urban streets far below and lines of trees now almost shorn of their yellowed leaves. Straight ahead, I can just catch the tip of a garden square, which is sometimes bathed in sunsets of G�tterdämmerung intensity, and on the far horizon loom the familiar, but long-cold, towers of Battersea power station.

Mary Dejevsky: Cool realism is a political virtue, too

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

No ideological recipe or vision could have replaced sound judgement in 1989

Mary Dejevsky: You don't need an MP's pay to live in SW1

Friday, 6 November 2009

Of all the arguments advanced by disgruntled MPs against Sir Christopher Kelly's proposed curbs on their expenses, there is one that I find particularly, outrageously, dishonest. It is the one that says they will produce a Parliament of the super-rich. The same ardent defenders of the status quo tend also to have a uniquely disingenuous line about how the new rules will particularly deter women. Really? Even more than the misogynistic colleagues in the Chamber? More than the "Neanderthal" selection boards? More than any other job that requires half of a couple to work away from home? Come off it; any aspiring female MP will be made of sterner stuff.

Mary Dejevsky: Remember the Berlin Wall – and not only how it fell

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

For decades there will be those who live in fear of a knock at the door

Mary Dejevsky: A fiasco that shows British diplomacy is clapped out

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Comment

Mary Dejevsky: Why is useful information still so elusive?

Friday, 30 October 2009

In the tech world they are called "early adopters", and I am definitely not one of them – save in three respects. As a foreign correspondent through the late 1980s and 1990s, I and my tribe were at the leading edge of telecoms, as we advanced from tape-punching telexes to laptops with modems, then to wireless. Back then, you had to make the stuff work, even if it meant taking a screwdriver to the hotel phone socket. If you couldn't transmit your story, you might as well not have been there at all.

Mary Dejevsky: Britain, Europe and a history of lamentable mis-timing

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

David Cameron is swimming against the tide of history

Mary Dejevsky: Keep your hands off my health records

Friday, 23 October 2009

To judge by the personal information individuals cheerfully make public about themselves on Facebook and the rest, perhaps all information will eventually be deemed public unless expressly designated private. For the time being, though, the hawking of personal, especially medical, information still has the capacity to shock, and a report on ITV's Tonight programme this week will only have stoked people's worst fears.