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“... differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why Prime Ministers would continue the ritual of the weekly interview with the sovereign if they found it entirely without purpose. From the other perspective, if the ...”

“... and citizens sharing equally what Mair calls an ‘anti-political sentiment’. In 2000 Tony Blair could say with a straight face, ‘I was never really in politics,’ while a member of his cabinet trumpeted the ‘depoliticising of key decision-making’. In practice, such talk meant that politicians were trying to cut loose from their own ...”

“... immigrants won’t ‘integrate’. This shameful state of affairs was legitimised in 2005 by Tony Blair in the White Paper Controlling Our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain: ‘Tolerance [is] under threat from those … abusing our hospitality.’ Faced with a moral panic about alien hordes pouring into Britain from the Russian Empire, the ...”

“... Unionists to bring about just such a power-sharing solution in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Tony Blair himself has made it clear that more attention was paid to Sinn Féin than to the SDLP at least in some degree because the former represented part of a violent, armed movement: The SDLP thought that they often got ignored because we were too busy ...”

“... work self-deceived? And why do postmodern writers make it so exasperatingly difficult to say that Tony Blair really did hoodwink the British public over Iraq? There is a form of literary critique that takes this problem on board, though Felski’s book does not address this head-on. For disciples of the late Yale critic Paul de Man, there is a sense in ...”

“... threatened. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ have been among its guiding concepts (in 2005, Tony Blair was able to win a general election with the vacuous campaign slogan ‘Forward not back’). In rejecting knowledge of the future, Brexitists are saying no to such a politics and to the assumptions about social change on which it rests. Theirs is ...”

“... as much as it does Le Pen. For the left, Macron isn’t just a French version of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair – a supposedly progressive politician who extols the free market and has sold out to big business. He also conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have ...”

“... at the end of April one poll had Theresa May on 61 per cent (higher than Thatcher in 1983 and Blair in 2001) and Corbyn on 26 per cent. It also had the Tories on 49 per cent for voting intention and Labour on 23 per cent. Figures of this sort are typical. It’s even possible that Wales will be lost to the Tories, though they haven’t won a majority ...”

“... her any better); her speeches were greeted with jeers and she was called a ‘stupid cow’ by Tony Marlow, one of John Major’s Maastricht rebels (there’s a video of this on YouTube: Marlow looks very pleased with himself, especially when he manages to repeat the remark after the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, asks him whether he’d used ‘unparliamentary ...”

“... a tithe of the attention it deserves, it will present the first serious test of the calibre of Tony Blair. In his well-received speech to the last Labour Party Conference, Mr Blair went out of his way to promise the restoration of union rights at GCHQ, and received much praise for his attacks on official secrecy and ...”

“... not just that the Tories have won four General Elections running: they have hardly needed to run. Tony Blair has shown that he is alert to the implication that Labour needs to be imaginative, flexible and responsive if it is to be confident of victory next time. The alternative strategy, of course, seen in the defenders of Clause Four, is to wait with ...”

“... chiefly in the cause of social control and illegal violence. In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a ...”

“... reputation, and Ziegler makes scarcely any such claims. It was to Thatcher, not Heath, that Tony Blair hastened to pay court. And although the Con-Lib coalition has made much of its determination to protect the poorest against the cuts better than they were protected in the 1980s, it is common ground that the reduction of the deficit must be given ...”

“... two Westerners were shot, one fatally, within 24 hours of the strikes). On the BBC, I watched Tony Blair enthusiastically endorsing the attacks. Even then they looked petulant; now it is clear they were self-defeating. All they did was turn Bin Laden into a household name throughout the region, if not the world, and recruit thousands to his cause ...”

“... Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to the present (his title and subtitle are on much the same lines as Margach’s). At first blush, it is hard to see that much has changed. Price is particularly good at showing how half the prime ministers of the last ...”