[…] 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, […]
[…] the Government’s political case without taking full account of the qualifications attached to such information, which is a necessary part of intelligence assessment,” he says.’ (26) In ‘Blair hasn’t even convinced his own security establishment’ in The Guardian of 24 February, Richard Norton-Taylor cited the leaked DIS document and quoted former Foreign Secretary Douglas […]
[…] It is stoic, it is Roman, it is Western. There is also a pragmatism about which politicians to back and which to let go so that Blair and the ex-Maoist Barroso are in, and the traditionalist Gaullist Chirac is out. This is where we need more research. What are the neo-conservatives doing in […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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) […]
[…] New Labour? The spoils of war Mattinson’s overall boss at Chime Communications, Lord Bell, was one of the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ largesse through contracts issued by the Blair government for post-invasion work in Iraq. Bell’s Bell-Pottinger – for a while home to No 10 press chief David Hill where he worked on the Monsanto […]
