[…] King saying that: ‘splendid chaps doing a wonderful job.’ Tom King, as they say, isn’t the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer. This may explain why Mr Blair left him in the job when Labour won the election in 1997. The Labour Party’s passivity in face of the secret state is a more complex […]
[…] bad taste, it has set aside $20m for Washington’s Victory in Iraq celebration.() Prime Minister Blair’s legacy By the time the Victory Party takes place, Prime Minister Blair will be out of office. Nevertheless, he will be one of the guests. The severed limbs of others have earned him his place at Washington’s top […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: Blair Inc. Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan London: John Blake, 2015, £20.00, h/b O ne of the two reported contributions Tony Blair made to Labour’s 2015 election campaign was a speech in support of the European Union. In April the former leader said: ‘The referendum will, for the first time since […]
[PDF file]: […] Amazon and Abebooks. It originally appeared in Lobster 43 and seems worth reposting in the context of the Al Jazeera revelations about Israeli operations in British politics.1 Blair and Israel Robin Ramsay In January 1994, three months before John Smith’s death, the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, with wife Cherie Booth, went on […]
[PDF file]: The Blair Supremacy A study in the politics of Labour’s party management Lewis Minkin Manchester University Press, 2014, 798 pp. Colin Challen Published seven years ago, Minkin’s book has taken on a new relevance and I have been prompted to review it by two events. The first was the death of its author earlier […]
[…] concerned that all this pro-UN, anti-war stuff might make the party appear electorally ‘weak’. Even the notions of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ and ‘preventive wars’ go back long before Blair: Phythian for example quotes Kinnock wanting to finish Saddam off preemptively in 1991; and there’s a clear if minority ‘humanitarian interventionist’ tradition in the party that […]
Poverty Tony Blair promised to eradicate child poverty in the UK. A couple of articles, ‘Redefining poverty will lead to ridicule, ministers told’ (The Independent 27 August 2002) and ‘Poor definition confuses poverty’ (The Daily Telegraph 27 August 2002) suggest that the government is thinking of ‘eradicating’ poverty by redefining it. Hospital waiting lists […]
[…] the prudence on which Prime Minister Gordon Brown built his reputation. The man tasked with sorting out the financial mess now that Lord Levy has followed Tony Blair into the sunset is his old Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) colleague Jon Mendelsohn. Announcing the appointment of the business lobbyist in August, Labour said Mendelsohn’s […]
