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“... example: the Iraq war. (I know, I know, we have to move on sometime, but this is important.) Tony Blair went to war in the face of widespread (though by no means universal) public scepticism. He justified this course of action on two grounds. First, it was his job to take a lead, even if the public did not like it. The implication here was that the ...”

“... all sides to the negotiating table, at first tentatively under John Major’s government, then by Tony Blair. ‘Various factors’, Leahy writes (one of his favourite phrases), contributed to the IRA’s decision to call ceasefires in 1994 and then in 1997 after the New Labour and Fianna Fáil governments in London and Dublin dropped their demands for ...”

“... The resistance is too well entrenched in the Sunni Arab provinces of Iraq for it to be eradicated. Tony Blair, echoing Iyad Allawi, speaks of 14 out of 18 provinces being completely safe, but everybody in Iraq knows this is untrue. The Iraqi, American and British governments can maintain this myth about peaceful parts of Iraq only because they are too ...”

“... Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady ...”

“... therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy. In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s ...”

“... but it was now tightly bound to improvements in economic efficiency and consumer experiences. When Tony Blair used the word ‘modernisation’, he meant driving competition into public services. The idea of the ‘modern’ was shorn of its utopian or politically disruptive implications, provoking the suggestion that the future no longer existed, at ...”

“... 10 June 1993. Fellow-guests with Tony and Cherie Blair at a BBC dinner. Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied ...”

“... to upward mobility. (Goldthorpe tells a nice story about a Cabinet Office seminar at which one of Blair’s chief political advisers protested: ‘But Tony can’t possibly go to the country on a platform of increasing downward mobility!’) In the effort to address equality of opportunity, the silence around downward ...”

“... had contained clothes, clothes that were subsequently traced to the shop of a Maltese man called Tony Gauci. Gauci later became a key prosecution witness. Fragments of a circuit board and a Toshiba radio were also recovered and identified as parts of the bomb. Twelve years later, on 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted a former Libyan ...”

“... shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel haunts Kray foot-soldier Tony Lambrianou like a psychogeographical nightmare. The route he drove that fated night is a mantra he can never stifle: Evering Road, Lower Clapton Road, Narrow Way, Mare Street, Cambridge Heath Road, Commercial Road, East India Dock Road, Blackwall Tunnel. The ...”

“... At first sight, the Hutton Report seemed to provide further evidence of Tony Blair’s intuitive political genius. It was extraordinary to have reaped from the appointment of Lord Hutton a set of findings which transformed a crisis that threatened to be overwhelming into a vindication of every aspect of the government’s conduct, and of the prime minister’s moral probity in particular ...”

“... two sons, followed his brother, Leslie, to Eton, where he was a contemporary and friend of Eric Blair. In later life he was much irritated by questions from the compilers of the ‘Orwelliad’, as he called them, asking him for his impressions of a person who, as he pointed out, he had not by then seen for 77 years. This didn’t stop him from supplying ...”

“... his debonair host John Mortimer and his lovely wife and other famous guests like Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair and their lovely wives just happened to be in Tuscany when Robertson took a phone call and at once accepted the Guardian’s brief for the Hamilton libel action. Reporters, especially good ones like David Leigh, should hire colour-blind subs. More ...”

“... understand, they’ve attempted to modernise using replicas made with imported moulds. Think of Tony Blair abolishing the office of Lord Chancellor by press release in 2003. The Lord Chancellor’s department was immediately reformed and replaced by a Department for Constitutional Affairs, which lasted only until 2007, when it morphed into a ...”

“... of the Council of Europe and is preparing to host the G8 summit, to be attended by George Bush, Tony Blair and other world leaders, in St Petersburg later this month. This incongruity is hard to fathom, just as it is hard to understand how European governments – in spite of their much touted commitment to human rights and the rule of law – can ...”