“... political threat neutered. In 1994, the year of Loaded’s first issue and Oasis’s first album, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party and immediately rewrote ‘Clause Four’ of its constitution, which had until then committed the party to public ownership of industry. ‘Cool Britannia’, Britpop and lad mags notably looked back to the 1960s for ...”

“... tasked Davies with drawing up plans for devolution in Wales. Smith was a true believer, unlike Tony Blair. But Blair inherited fully formed plans for devolution in Scotland and Wales when he became leader in 1994, and Smith’s commitment to hold referendums went into the manifesto. They took place shortly after ...”

“... which attracted some attention during l’affaire Lewinsky; the author of newspaper articles by ‘Tony Blair’. (This last chapter, which seems to have been a bright idea by the British publisher, is a mistake. Is there a single sentient being anywhere in the UK who for a second thinks they were written by anyone other than Alistair Campbell? It would ...”

“... 1960s was one of the many elements of Thatcherism eagerly embraced by New Labour. In July 2004, Tony Blair attacked the era of ‘freedom without responsibility’, which had produced ‘a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others’. He ...”

“... work after he ordered tanks to fire on the Russian parliament in 1993. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi helped launder the blood-stained record of Yeltsin’s chosen successor. In 2001, Blair told the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been investigating Putin’s war ...”

“... in Norman Lamont’s capacious, not to say elastic, basement. However, I note that the winsome Tony Blair, who is not about to be outdone on any sector of the law-and-order front, has recently stood up before the whole school and bared his reminiscences. On a recent edition of Panorama, he told a pro-corpun couple he met on some stricken doorstep in ...”

“... select it makes sense to inquire into the grounds on which they’re choosing. Did the voters pick Tony Blair because he is young and dynamic, because they approved of his policies or because they were tired of the Tories? Controversies about the real units of natural selection arise when analogies are illegitimately invoked in complex contexts in which ...”

“... Social Exclusion Unit began to inject millions of pounds into the worst ‘problem estates’. Tony Blair pioneered the public-private partnerships that operate today, whereby estates are demolished and council tenants rehoused in ‘social rented’ properties administered by housing associations, while developers plug the funding gap for new houses ...”

“... known in the late 1990s as Robocop, when his ‘zero tolerance’ policing caught the attention of Tony Blair: he had promised to reduce crime by 20 per cent in 18 months or stand down. He got there, but not without trouble. He had apparently turned a blind eye to two detectives trading drugs for information, warning dealers of impending drugs busts and ...”

“... repeal of the Union, O’Connell practised as a barrister, the most theatrical of the professions. Tony Blair was also a barrister, his wife is the barrister daughter of an actor, and Blair’s headmaster at Fettes remembered him as a consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ...”

“... in the capital of the free world. Clinton recalls convivial consensus-building with the likes of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Lionel Jospin and Henrique Cardoso over how to run the world in the coming century, but nothing like this happens in Washington, where business is done largely by squeezing out or suppressing votes by visibly ignoble ways and ...”

“... MacMillan triumphed with that earlier volume, an unexpected bestseller that was praised by Tony Blair as ‘a fascinating piece of history’. Peacemakers is a brilliantly vivid study, which succeeds remarkably in evoking procedures and arguments that might well have seemed exhausting, remote and dry as dust. It also made clear that MacMillan is ...”

“... Prince Bandar claimed his share of the $86 billion deal with BAE Systems, a commission approved by Tony Blair and his attorney general. Few imagine that the investigation will lead anywhere, since US and other European companies do similar deals all the time. The mandarins in the Defence Ministry in Whitehall refuse to be bothered by the fuss, and the ...”

“... less than a third of what the Express did at its height, and more than a decade of railing against Tony Blair had no effect on his electoral record. Yet there isn’t another newspaper editor in Britain who reads every word of his own paper. He is described in this book, mainly by present and former colleagues, as ‘a loner’, ‘awkward and ...”

“... are briskly described here (it’s hard to forget that Adonis, once schools minister under Tony Blair, was himself abandoned by his mother at the age of three and brought up in care homes until he was 11), but knowledge of them increases the reader’s admiration for Bevin’s lifelong generosity of spirit. This flourished as a consequence of ...”