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“... Tony Blair emerges from these memoirs as a man of extraordinary intellectual self-confidence. He likes to think for himself, and decide for himself, whatever the issue. He takes this to be one of the key attributes of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not ...”

“... who was spoken of among her colleagues as the Coming Man. She reported back a day or so later. ‘Tony Blair.’ ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘He’s a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh ...”

“... in June, John Patten praised it, the Home Secretary says Selbourne has proved conclusively that Tony Blair cannot turn the Labour Party into a ‘civic’ party, and so, more or less endlessly, on. What has got into editors, politicians and the public? A variety of things, of which three are obvious. One is that the Conservative Party is feeling the ...”

“... than Lincoln’s, more given to enthusiastic postures – in the political transcendentalism of Tony Blair. The Blair-Bush misreading, as I see it, comes from dwelling on the words ‘constantly’ and ‘everywhere’ and ignoring the rest of Lincoln’s sentence. He was speaking of a standard, not of a visible and ...”

“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... increased the importance of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join ...”

“... the writing of the novel, there was also a strong imperative to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality is on the wane. The Ghost is self-consciously concerned with the logic of publicity and sales, the pressure to get the former prime minister’s memoirs out there as soon as possible. It also acknowledges the short shelf-life of ...”

“... It Just Me . . . ? that have also – or at any rate might well have – appeared on Spoons are: Tony Blair, chick-lit, city breaks, Sofia Coppola, Alain de Botton, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Tracey Emin, exercise videos, foot spas, Ikea, improving the value of your property, Boris Johnson, Kabbalah, lastminute.com, Live8, loft-living, loyalty cards, the ...”

“... significant numbers of London policemen had been sent, to help stop the balaclava-ed anarchists. Tony Blair, taking time off from the feasting and shoulder-rubbing at Gleneagles, said that the summit would continue, that the terrorists were ‘trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want ...”

“... described extraordinary rendition as a ‘lawful weapon’ which has nothing to do with torture. Tony Blair has suggested it must be OK if only because it’s been going on for years, and a spokesman for the prime minister has blithely announced that ‘we do not believe that we are involved in this story.’ CIA aeroplanes, some of them registered as ...”

“... says, before going on to ask: but how do you reconcile free will with divine omniscience? (Tony Blair must be relieved that Boethius doesn’t sit on a House of Commons select committee.) Philosophy has a pretty decent answer. (The Prime Minister must long to have someone like that on his side.) Anglo-Saxon chiefs have changed over the last ...”

“... French right. Manuel Valls, currently the Socialist prime minister, declares his admiration for Tony Blair while competing with the Front National’s Marine Le Pen to humiliate minorities. There is more than a whiff of Vichy in the air, with Muslims and Roma taking the place of Jews. How many passers-by are aware that the monument in the centre of the ...”

“... in the reporters’ gallery to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German ...”

“... their Westminster seats to his popular appeal. Or so John Major came to feel by the end of 1992. Tony Blair must be thankful that things are now working out so differently for his government, and that, having been elected as New Labour, it is finding it so easy to govern as New Labour, free of the ideological tensions, ministerial bungling, personal ...”

“... Behind every great man is a great spin-doctor. Tony Blair has gorgeous pouting Alistair Campbell, exhack, ex-alcoholic, ex-pornographer, all-round thug and family-values man. What a guy! William Hague meanwhile is not a great man and behind him is Sebastian Coe. Lately, however, he has employed the services of another gorgeous ex-hack, Amanda Platell, fun-loving Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, and now would-be novelist ...”