“... 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 ...”

“... clear lessons to take from the first twenty years of the Greater London Authority. Established by Tony Blair in 2000 after fourteen years during which London had no city-wide government, it bears many of New Labour’s hallmarks, including an idiotic preference for the trappings of American administration. It concentrates all effective power, and there ...”

“... an essential oil used in the manufacture of scents.) An astute recycler, networker, synthesiser: a Blair or a Starmer, not a Corbyn or a Skinner. I’ve tried, but it’s hard not to think here of the Millennium Dome and its ‘Spirit Zone’, divided into subzones with names that sound as if a page has been torn from Eno’s What Art Does: Who We Are ...”

“... Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He may have wanted to get the book out quickly while Iraq, WMDs and Hutton still dominate the headlines, but, more important, writing exclusively about the Blair second term allows him to construct a narrative of political disillusion shorn of awkward questions about the compromises that had been necessary for him to stay loyal to the New Labour ‘project’ before 2001 ...”

“... blairing in 1858 as ‘polishing into correctness and smoothness’ (after the philosopher Hugh Blair, 1718-1800), which seems closer to the mark. Perhaps the Penguin compilers should also have reached for their Robert and looked up the French verb blairer, as in je ne peux pas le blairer (‘he gives me the creeps’). Those easily offended should on no ...”

“... decades. What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign generated a mass movement that renewed the base of the Labour Party ...”

“... especially the Sun, had played a central role in beating Labour in the 1992 general election. When Blair took over as leader in 1994, he had an overwhelming sense that he needed to court the press, in particular the party’s traditional enemies on the right. As he said in 2000, Under Thatcher . . . they got drunk on the power she let them wield and then ...”

“... were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft ...”

“... his time as prime minister of Lower Saxony.* In 1999 he wrote a Third Way-style manifesto with Tony Blair. It was taken rather more seriously in Berlin than it was in London and provoked howls of indignation from SPD members. But though Schröder may have given it the green light, the decisive push for Agenda 2010, as Anke Hassel and Christof Schiller ...”

“... mark. And so a verified George W. Bush tweeted that he ‘missed killing Iraqis’. A verified Tony Blair replied: ‘Same tbh’. An account called @teslareal – it looked just like the real Tesla account – posted that there was a problem with the car’s navigation system; @nycgov and @NYC_GOVERNMENT each tweeted that they were the only authentic ...”

“... Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and others were put in charge of forming a committee to oversee the Palestinian technocrats who would manage day-to-day affairs in Gaza. A new military body known as the International Stabilisation Force would take over security control. As Shawan ...”

“... rate. When the then Leader of the Opposition was questioned about his support for this Bill, Tony Blair said that it was the sort of thing Labour might themselves have to do in government. In fact, within eighteen months of becoming Prime Minister, he had gone one better, pushing through the Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998 in ...”

“... hopes were still pinned, was a comfort here. So was Harold Wilson’s idea (later taken up by Tony Blair) that Britain’s past imperial experience gave her unique tools and skills that could still be used to solve world problems; Britain was said to possess cultural sensitivities, for example, that the US conspicuously lacked. Attlee, too, thought ...”

“... to do was bring it up and fight for justice.’ Such promises have been made before. In 2006, Tony Blair was pictured holding a sign saying ‘Justice for Cammell Laird’. In 2008, the men had a meeting with Gordon Brown. About ten years ago there was talk of a film, but the money ran out. In 2014, the European Parliament called for the government ...”

“... policy stuck closely to this philosophy in the 1990s and 2000s, under John Major and Tony Blair, but subsequent governments abandoned it. Major reforms in the mid-2010s under David Cameron introduced subsidies for renewables and for gas-fired power stations. The measures were supposed to be temporary, even before Cameron promised to cut ...”