Archive for tony blair
A reminder of the fantastic farce that was Labour leadership plotting
Ah, happy memories from back when Tom Watson and co. signed a letter to Tony Blair calling on him to quit, aka 2006. What did they do with the letter? Here’s what: Downing Street said last night that it had received the letter, but that it had been sent to a random fax machine.
Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: politics as seen through the eyes of MORI polls
Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is the latest in the series of general election analysis by MORI’s Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimore, this time joined by two other authors. The book is therefore very much the tale of the 2005-2010 Parliament and subsequent general election seen through the eyes of MORI’s opinion polling, with an often pungent [...]
Blair criticised by top civil servant for keeping Iraq legal advice from Cabinet
The Guardian reports: The country’s most senior civil servant … said the cabinet should have been told of the attorney general’s doubts about the legality of invading Iraq before Tony Blair went to war. “The ministerial code is very clear about the need, when the attorney general gives written advice, the full text of that [...]
How to defeat Al Qaeda
The cover of Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda shows a group of armed men working their way up a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley that stretches away to rolling hills. It captures the wonder and the tragedy of Afghanistan in one frame. The book itself is similarly crisp, packing a wide-ranging history of [...]
Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?
The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would [...]
New Labour, New Danger: the largely forgotten TV film
The so-called “Tony Blair Demon eyes” Conservative billboard poster from the 1990s has a well-established place in the history of British political advertising – high profile, criticised by many leading Church figures, ruled unacceptable by the Advertising Standards Authority, often derided as ineffective yet given an ad-industry award (for more on all of which, see [...]
Book review: Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man – Life at the heart of New Labour
At the book’s title suggests, Peter Mandelson’s memoirs The Third Man do not hold back from placing himself not only at the heart of New Labour but also at its top, variously using the phrases the three musketeers or the triumvirate to describe himself and the two Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Mandelson [...]
Information Commissioner upholds complaint over Tony Blair’s activities
During the general election campaign I highlighted how TonyBlair4Labour, the official vehicle for Tony Blair’s campaigning on behalf of the Labour Party, looked to be illegally exporting data overseas. The Information Commission has now (finally) ruled on my complaint, agreeing that the organisation had indeed failed to follow data protection rules properly and is now [...]
Government moves right, political agenda moves elsewhere
Whether driven by circumstance or long-term plan, the reaction of David Cameron to the general election result has been an attempt to realign British politics around the centre-right, using the need to strike – and then keep an agreement – with the Liberal Democrats as a way to drag his party away from its more [...]
