Arthur Snell at the Stroud Book Festival

Helena got me a ticket for this event at today's Stroud Book Festival, which was held at Lansdown Hall, one of my favourite old buildings in the town, whose redevelopment I have been involved with since about 2010 when I was a town councillor. I'm always pleased when it becomes a venue for interesting events.

Arthur Snell is a former career 'diplomat' at Britain's  Foreign and Commonwealth Office and his new book's title is self-explanatory. He was good company, amusing and reasonably forthright about politics and global affairs. I will buy the book as I'm always fascinated to learn more about the background to these affairs of states.

The Stroud Book Festival has a local feel wherever possible, and it turned out that both the internationally renowned barrister who interviewed Arthur on stage tonight, and Arthur himself both live in the Stroud Valleys.

I did a bit of Googling on my return home and was quite amused to find that Mr Snell might have been a bit of a spook, to put it mildly, given his track record of appointments around the British Embassies of the world. Currently he is the Managing Director of a company owned by a 'Christopher Steele', who came to international prominence when he was outed as the author of:
'The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report written from 2016, containing allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign' (copied with thanks from this Wiki page)


I was rather hooked on/horrified by the Donald Trump sagas and the subsequent Muller investigations. So imagine my surprise to find local connections. You have to remember that only a very few miles away is the site of GCHQ, so coming across members of the intelligence community around this area is never very surprising.