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“... country, and another set of bankers moves in. Not all City types are vile, obviously. My friend Tony isn’t vile. We have many interests in common and chat easily about all sorts of things. But I’m sometimes made aware of a significant gap between us. It’s a philosophical and practical gap, and it is to do with money. ...”

“... to a halt in a fraction of a second was subjected to market shocks that had no market solution. Blair’s government had already intervened to slow down the switch from coal to gas; in 2002 it had little choice but to bail out British Energy, the private company that owned the nuclear stations. And there was a deeper, less visible problem. Neta was ...”

“... Clarke (King’s, plus a brief period at the Brookings Institution in Washington), claimed that Blair had been ‘guilty of confused optimism’.After Iraq, a number of senior figures in the British military had misgivings about intervening in Libya in 2011 but the defence intelligentsia didn’t share their concerns. RUSI’s major report on Libya, which ...”

“... in Europe is a frustrating business. In Britain Liberal Democrats can only stand by and fume while Blair’s Third Way steals liberal nostrums and enlists them in the service of a new centrist consensus designed to keep Lib Dems on the margins for ever. In Germany, the liberals have gone from being the king-makers of the Kohl era to bystanders in ...”

“... close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s solid support, that was enough to set News International on Watson’s scent. A campaign of personal vilification ...”

“... May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory and the day in 1982 on which a British navy submarine torpedoed the General Belgrano. Soon after colleagues at Camp Abu Naji woke up to news of Anthony Wakefield’s death, Lynndie England would appear in a Texas court to ...”

“... towards radical conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work beneath the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence ...”

“... public sector outsourcing, whose shtick rests on the idea that government is crap at doing stuff. Tony Blair’s obsession with ‘public service modernisation’, built on the creed that ‘what matters is what works,’ provided an adjacent justification for outsourcing and endless managerial reforms: they would, it was said, inject more ...”

“... a catchphrase for the Nineties: almost as soon as the words ‘stakeholding society’ were out of Tony Blair’s mouth, they were being dismissed as just another piece of vapid electioneering. But ‘stakeholding’ is a perfectly respectable idea. If Blair thinks it is going to win him any votes he is almost certainly ...”

“... ended with the FA managing yet again to stave off the statutory regulation it so badly needs. How Blair could entrust such a task to Chris Smith and Tony Banks beggars belief: Kate Hoey, a far superior politician, merely got sacked for her pains, much to the delight of the FA. When Ken Richardson, the owner of Doncaster ...”

“... to foist gay priests on them. In fact, a Sri Lankan journalist wrote in 1999, reacting against Tony Blair’s pontificating, ‘like everything else, human rights . . . are not absolute and are relative. They are relative to the culture. The present-day human rights are relative to the present West, which has been successful in establishing their ...”

“... off the decommissioning hook on which Mayhew (acting on Major’s instructions) had impaled it. Tony Blair’s Government didn’t have to rely on Unionist votes and this made things much easier. But the Unionists had scented blood and were not about to let go. The recalcitrant among them had hit on their make or break issue. When it finally ...”

“... the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too ...”

“... diaries to equal the extraordinary raw material supplied by Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn for the delectation of students of government. The best explanation for this party discrepancy I have hit on is that whereas all people of the right enter politics to exercise power, at least some people of the left are as fascinated by how they do what ...”

“... clear barrier has provoked the great powers to trump up international pretexts for intervention, Tony Blair’s dodgy dossiers being a prime example. ‘Dossiers’ in the plural, for it was not simply the sexing up of the scant intelligence available on whether Saddam Hussein possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that seemed dishonest; WMD always ...”