Cherie Blair: Speaking for Myself Cherie Blair London: Little, Brown, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The relentless harrying of Neil Kinnock by the Murdoch press at the time of the 1992 general election outraged Labour Party people, among them Cherie Blair. This was the general election when The Sun proudly boasted that it was its […]
[…] were big wheels in the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 Liddle even standing as a LibDem parliamentary candidate in 1992 before joining the Blair team after the death of John Smith two years later. Now working alongside Thomson in the upper reaches of the BBC is David Jordan, who has […]
The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story. Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is […]
Blair and Gladstone Tony Blair’s Labour Party conference speech this year galvanised the delegates who were especially moved by his suggestions that Britain could play the role of an international troubleshooter, bringing liberal values, civilisation and the benefits of its skills in conflict resolution to troubled parts of the world. There were however […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] mark 1 without all the pseudoscience about the money supply. Because it has started from lower inflation than existed in 1980 the interest rate rises under Brown/ Blair have not – yet – had to have been to be as savage as those of Thatcher/Howe in the early 1980s. Even Hugo Young has noticed […]
[…] British American Project. Both were officials of the Tribune Group of Labour MPs as it became a tame leadership vehicle. Both were very close to Mandy and Blair. Both were very much modernising members of the New Labour Cabinet after the 1997 election. And both were thrown out of the Cabinet. While Smith merits […]
[…] go-between, first with Margaret Thatcher, and later with John Major. This material is extremely interesting, providing, among other things, an insider’s account of Murdoch’s embrace of Tony Blair and New Labour. In a country with a more robust democratic tradition what Wyatt reveals would be a scandal, in Britain we have become so used […]
All four of Tony Blair’s new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour’s Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The […]
[…] 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, […]
