Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist and diplomat
(born 17 October 1958) is a Scottish former diplomat for the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office who was the ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004, a post from which he was removed. In later years, he has been known for his defence of Julian Assange, and for contentious claims published on his blog and X, formerly known as Twitter. He was the Workers Party of Britain candidate in Blackburn at the 2024 general election coming third with 18.3% of votes.
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Alternative Names:
Craig John Murray
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The Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content. During the dispute he panned one of his superiors in the FCO's eastern department, for questioning whether the number of political prisoners in Uzbekistan had increased. According to a British official familiar with the correspondence, he wrote: "I understand that you might find this fact politically inconvenient. If you wish me to omit it, then say so. But don't pretend it isn't true." He attacked his superior for his "sadly cautious and above all completely unimaginative" censures, and attacked the "classic public school and Oxbridge influenced FCO house style", as "ponderous, self-important and ineffective".
The speech began to take on a life of its own. Kofi Annan raised its contents during a meeting with Uzbekistani president Islam Karimov. It became a serious thorn in Tashkent's - and Washington's - side. Murray's confrontational style pressed it further into the flesh. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he could not contain his fury at the "double standards" being practised by Washington. He wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched [George W.] Bush talk of "dismantling the apparatus of terror" and "removing the torture and rape rooms" in Iraq, pointing out that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora ... I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan."
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In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ...
The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative.
The next morning brings good news. The two shops I specified are both available. They both belong to the local brewer, Thwaites. The one I choose has two pubs to its immediate right and one to its left. Only one of them is a going concern.
This is one of Blackburn's most striking features. It has an astonishing number of ex-pubs. Some have been converted to other uses, but many more are derelict. I wonder why there were so many and what factors caused this cull. Something else I have yet to learn.
I return to London to find messages waiting from Martin Bell and Brian Eno; both want to help my campaign. Then I receive news from the estate agent. Thwaites has decided it will not let me rent any of its property in Blackburn. Its directors feel it would not be in the company's interests to allow its premises to be used to campaign against Jack Straw.
I'm an Anglo really, born in England, like Sandy Lyle and Rod Stewart [...] but my father came from this huge Edinburgh family. He was in the forces and was posted down to Norfolk, which is where he met my mum. I grew up down in Norfolk, but I went back up to - and always spent a lot of time in - Scotland.
In reply, I said to them, "When you’re speaking at a big demonstration, like a Stop the War demonstration, it's impossible to know who the others are and often these things go on for hours and personally I don't ever tend to stay around much, I just tend to make my speech and leave."
But if they're people I know, like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or Stop the War, then I trust them as a sensible organisation in terms of who they invite.
[First sentence refers to George Galloway] At least the Respect MP refrained from naming Assange's alleged victims. No such restraint for Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, who denounced one of them by name on Newsnight, violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy.
The problem with the world is there are conspiracies [...] The idea that they don't happen is ridiculous. As an ambassador I have seen the establishment from the inside, the workings of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 with millions in their budgets — what kind of things do you think they are doing?
The hands of the British state are all over this. The roots of it were a political conspiracy against Alex Salmond, to destroy both his reputation and career, and why, because he was a threat to the British state, one of the biggest threats in 300 years who had taken the country to the brink of independence.