[…] attempt to do a deal with the Blair-led Labour Party, there are some other interesting snippets; and, through Ashdown’s eyes, there is a detailed portrait of Tony Blair which suggests that Rory Bremner’s impersonation of him on Channel 4 has got it about right. Pages and pages of conversation with Blair are reproduced verbatim. […]
[…] also happens to be a defence of Andrew Gilligan’s hurried, exaggerated, but for all that essentially true report on BBC’s ‘Today’ of the ‘sexing up’ of the Blair dossier. Don’t let pompous news folk at, say, the Columbia School of Journalism hear this, but the surprising corollary of Rule C is that the biggest […]
[…] always been defined in an Anglo-American context.’ Gordon Brown used to tell interviewers that he spent his holidays in the library at Harvard University. In 1986 Tony Blair went on one of those US-sponsored trips to America that are available for promising MPs and came back a supporter of the nuclear deterent. In 1993 […]
Tony Blair might be considered guilty on two of the counts for which Hitler’s Foreign Secretary, Joachim von Ribbentrop was executed at Nuremberg, ‘namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for […]
[…] inconvenient truth that suffering from American mistakes and incompetence was always the price that the UK would pay if it accepted American leadership in the way that Blair did. The establishment narrative implied that, if the Americans had behaved differently and followed the British counter-insurgency approach, then all would have been well. This is […]
Why do they do this? In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) […]
[…] Campbell’s resignation in the wake of the death of Dr David Kelly, would be my nomination. All the familiar events in the great saga of ‘spin’, the Blair group’s attempt to manage the British media, are here; and done in great detail. Almost incidentally, this is also the best study of the incompetent, lazy, […]
Ah, the wonderful private sector In ‘ Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms’ in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: ‘Britain has the world’s most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them….Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so […]
[…] might be reasonably argued(1) that New Labour has brought the United Kingdom one third of the way towards a ‘tyranny’ if we look closely at what the Blair Government has actually done since 2001 and then measure it against Wolf’s ten steps to dictatorship.(2) In the strange amalgam of New Labour and state that […]
[…] first half dozen or so religious representatives to lead the prayers were Jewish. Another part of the PR campaign involved American representatives (and I include Prime Minister Blair) queuing up to go on Al-Jazeera TV. As a result, one highly educated transatlantic young Palestinian said to me in October: ‘We consider Al Jazeera at […]
