[…] 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 […]
[…] the Today programme’s ‘Man of the Year’ award. Allow researchers to count votes. Choke off supply of spontaneous votes with a prompted supply of votes for Tony Blair. BBC staff continue to count. Proven: Tony Blair is Man of the Year, 1996 – or would have been, had this delightful scam not been discovered […]
[…] the final day, the one-day session tacked on at the end, Sir Kevin Tebbitt, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, very carefully stuck the knife into Blair telling Lord Hutton that Blair had chaired the meeting which decided to identify Dr Kelly to the media. This statement told Hutton that Blair had lied; […]
[…] irredeemably old Labour for them, Denis Healey’s dictum, if you are in a hole, stop digging, would be worth their consideration. All our yesterdays Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years (London: Hutchinson, 2007, h/b, £25) has been widely reviewed elsewhere and, like most reviewers, I found it tedious and oddly fascinating at the same time. […]
[…] in London for Brown to use; funded McCauley Hobsbawm, the PR agency of Brown’s wife; and bought the New Statesman, saving it from being absorbed by the Blair gang. On pp. 69/70 he tells us that Brown met Bill Clinton at Baden-Baden in Germany. From the context this is 1989. (Bower is vague on […]
[…] minister is available, serves on the MPs executive committee of LFI. Mea culpas from some…. Chairing LFI these days is Jon Mendelsohn, the fund-raising lobbyist pal of Blair and Lord Levy, turned over by Greg Palast for influence-peddling way back at the start of New Labours reign. Mendelsohns old associate at lobbyists LLM, Neal […]
[…] 2005; David Hughes, ‘Premier’s secret council of war’, Daily Mail, 2 May 2005; Richard Norton-Taylor and Patrick Wintour, ‘Papers reveal commitment to war: Iraq secret documents indicate Blair support for military action a year before invasion took place’, The Guardian, 2 May 2005. For an account of what usually happens see David L. Robb, […]
[PDF file]: A tale of two Islingtons How Blair opened the door for Corbyn Simon Matthews Tom Bower doesn’t write proper biographies. Over 35 years he has published studies – basically investigative journalism – of Klaus Barbie, Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone, Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, Tony […]
[PDF file]: Broken Vows Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power Tom Bower London: Faber and Faber, 2016, £20, h/b Tony McWalter, a Labour MP and former philosophy lecturer, rose at Prime Minister’s Questions on 28 February 2002 and asked the following question: ‘Since my Right Honourable friend is sometimes subject to rather unflattering or even malevolent […]
[…] of the ERT to EU decision-making structures’. Sir David Simon is now installed in Whitehall as the Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe. So when the Blair government begins telling us that wages are too high in Britain, you will know from whom it is coming. Nexus backwards says Suxen! Nexus claims to […]
