“... rate. The Bill’s celebration of victimhood astutely catches the mood of the tabloid press: Tony Blair has even suggested that the criminal justice system should be renamed the victim justice system – an idea which threatens to turn criminal justice into a primitive system of personal retribution. To think of the Bill as a victim’s charter is ...”

“... allowed his ministers to take whatever side they preferred in the ensuing campaign, in which Tony Benn from Labour and Enoch Powell from the opposition – he had by then left the Tories and joined the Ulster Unionists – campaigned for a No vote. In June 1975, on a turnout of 64 per cent, two-thirds of those who voted – 67 per cent – approved the ...”

“... as the more immediate struggles he faces in Iraq and with his chancellor, that set the tone for Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party Conference last month. He and his advisers have been searching for a way to reconnect with the electorate, so that their triumph next year will seem like something more than a victory by default. One model to which ...”

“... even-handed mistrust of all politicians was a genuine pleasure at the displacement of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have ...”

“... UK, Mann is acutely conscious of the new American solipsism. He places some of the blame for it on Tony Blair, who is depicted as a ‘camp follower’ with a ‘walk-on part’ in Bush’s war on Iraq. Blair placed British soldiers in the service of a foreign power, ‘objectively’ aligning the UK with Ariel Sharon ...”

“... Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of the last hundred years: not even Baldwin or Thatcher quite equals him. Yet the record of his governments has been one of opportunities half-caught or missed entirely, of impulses that were sometimes admirable but rarely acted on, of reasonable but not unusual administrative competence, of some genuinely wrong-headed or shameful policies and, of course, a disastrous adventure abroad ...”

“... thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and the ...”

“... at the selection meeting was a bit underwhelming – one supporter says ‘he didn’t really have Blair’s panache’ – but it didn’t matter. He won. Ten years later, he’s prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and ...”

“... months before the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported in a secret memo to Tony Blair that he was told in Washington that the US was going to ‘remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. However, because ‘the case was thin, Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD ...”

“... though he does note that anagrams can reveal the villain within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than ...”

“... left, right and centre, that we have to step in and get things back to sensible levels. But it was Blair’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, who capped the legal aid budget, moved to fixed instead of hourly fees and let some areas of law, like personal injury, fall out of legal aid to be replaced with ‘no win no fee’ deals: little snips that have caused ...”

“... scientific breakthrough of the century – perhaps of all time’ and announced an agreement with Tony Blair stipulating the essential openness of scientific knowledge: We have a profound responsibility to ensure that the life-saving benefits of any cutting-edge research are available to all human beings . . . Our genome, the book in which all human ...”

“... his cover, he began to receive regular visits from British intelligence. He felt betrayed: ‘When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.’ Britain had lost its ‘democratic virginity’ to ‘the American cowboy’. Later that year he returned ...”

“... of the Global South pressed for a ceasefire, but the Bush administration (and, of course, Tony Blair) vetoed it, giving Israel ample time to pursue its stated goal of destroying Hizbullah and killing its leaders.But even full-scale bombardment failed to stop Hizbullah firing its rockets. The IDF had to send in troops, and they were shocked by the ...”

“... One aspect of Tony Blair’s memoir was under-celebrated when it was published last year: its remarkable handling of style.* For a 700-page book that was written in a hurry, A Journey’s register is very carefully judged. (Even the grammatical errors are impressively consistent: ‘The weeping and gnashing of teeth is pointless’; ‘The manifesto and the mandate was one for New Labour’; ‘I was reasonably settled in my mind that two terms was enough ...”