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Spookery, Skulduggery

David Runciman: Chris Mullin, 4 April 2019

The Friends of Harry Perkins 
by Chris Mullin.
Scribner, 185 pp., £12, March 2019, 978 1 4711 8248 8
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... Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in 1992. That defeat didn’t breathe new life ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: John Humphrys, 22 September 2005

... Jeremy Paxman, Humphrys is frequently criticised for his aggressive interview technique. But if Tony Blair is capable of turning Paxman’s savagery to his own advantage – he did well in his encounter with Paxman before the invasion of Iraq, for example – he invariably loses when he clashes with Humphrys. This may be in part because the prime ...

Diary

Paul Foot: The Labour Party’s vacillation over rail privatisation, 28 October 1999

... in the face of the most extravagant and impertinent opposition from US power monopolies, of the Blair Government’s attempts to encourage the coal industry by curbing the growth of gas, proof of the second. Yet for some reason, thanks at least in part to the abject performances of the Conservative Party, the Government did survive. One of the few political ...

Mr Straight and Mr Good

Paul Foot: Gordon Brown, 19 February 1998

Gordon Brown: The Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 358 pp., £17.99, February 1998, 0 684 81954 6
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... Telecom and thus restore public control over a monstrous private monopoly? Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. To Gould’s fury they stipulated that ‘all mention of state ownership had to go.’ The ‘Two Bs’ did not get their way on that occasion, but they were already embarked on a journey in precisely the opposite direction from that laid down by ...

Socialism in One County

David Runciman: True Blue Labour, 28 July 2011

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox: The Oxford London Seminars 2010-11 
edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White.
www.soundings.org.uk, 155 pp., June 2011, 978 1 907103 36 0
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... heritage and political instincts. They can be found in any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

... but the real and enduring scandal is the power of money in British politics. Cameron, like Tony Blair and many others, saw nothing wrong in selling his access to the highest bidder. Britain’s political culture appears intensely relaxed about perceptions of cronyism and nepotism. Corporate donations grease the wheels for lucrative public ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: The Doomsday Boys, 17 August 2006

... the world detests us because of it. It’s an odd, poisonous notion for a people to carry around. Tony Blair came over to the US, where some people still like him. He’s getting to look more and more like Steve Bell’s caricature. I liked it better when he was feeling more himself – the evil head boy, half-sadist, half-sycophant. Bush is clearly the ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Exit Blair, 24 May 2007

... Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry ...

What is Trident for?

Norman Dombey: America’s Poodle, 5 April 2007

The Future of the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: The White Paper, Cm. 6994 
Stationery Office, 140 pp., £13.50, December 2006, 0 10 169942 5Show More
The Future of the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: The White Paper. Ninth Report, House of Commons Defence Committee, HC 225-I 
Stationery Office, 88 pp., £14.50, March 2007, 978 0 215 03281 2Show More
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... normal circumstances, the Polaris fleet was not quite ‘our independent nuclear deterrent’, as Tony Blair described it in his foreword to the December 2006 White Paper on the renewal of Polaris’s replacement, Trident. The Nassau statement goes into some detail about the use of the Polaris force ‘for the purposes of international defence’: it ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The life expectancy of a Roman emperor, 3 June 2004

... be much better at knowing when to give up. It’s not a matter of life or death, certainly, though Blair talks so portentously about putting his job on the line you could be forgiven for thinking it was. Indeed, the implication that the most he has to sacrifice is his job tells you more than you might want to know about his (and many other ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Dick Cheney’s Homepage, 18 November 2004

... the war, and her reasons for leaving the government. She also suggests it would be no bad thing if Tony Blair were to resign. It occurs to me, however, that the prime minister’s opponents who believe he ought to quit are labouring under a misconception: that resignation is still a way of admitting to having done something wrong, or at least to having ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: Blair’s comedy turns, 7 September 2006

... had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s. Tony Blair is not much given to joking. The three memorable gags of his career have come as it nears its end. It’s interesting, in a person who likes to look serious even when he smiles, that they take him to the brink of buffoonery. The assertions, after ...

What Blair Threw Away

Ross McKibbin: Feckless, Irresponsible and Back in Power, 19 May 2005

... shouldn’t have been thinking of the country, he should have been thinking of the Labour Party. Blair, too, should have been thinking of the Labour Party. What on earth did he imagine was going to happen in those seats where the Muslim vote is almost crucial to Labour? Or in those seats with a high-minded middle class? Perhaps Oona King, Barbara Roche and ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... elections was not a success. Accusing the Tories of having no policies didn’t work either. ‘Tony Blair says it’s all style and no substance,’ Cameron told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed Pot.’ On issues ranging from civil liberties to aviation, Labour ...

Diary

Susan McKay: Breakdown in Power-Sharing, 8 March 2018

... anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it seemed that a deal was about to be made. May and Varadkar flew in to Belfast on 12 February, ready to welcome it. But it soon became clear that the talks were ...

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