And then there are the vinegary tweets that have put Foggy Bottom in a swivet . Araud, a key player in the 2003 birth of the Britain-German-French initiative to curb Iran's nuclear programme, has been cautioning the US not to rush, after 12 years of negotiating, to make a bad deal with Iran.

It is in a perpetual swivet stoked by media for which every interinstitutional dust-up is a crisis.