"The worst-written memoir ever twittered by a serious politician"

Arthur

I love the way he describes how he lied to both sides during the NI peace negotiations, and then imagines that he could EVER be trusted by anyone in a serious negotiation, ever again. I thought the man was supposed to be intelligent?

denis cooper

Please, enough about bloody Blair.

Rob

That photo is fake, or staged at least. First, the book in the photo is paperback, whereas it has only been released in hardback and electronic versions so far. Second, the title reads 'Memories', not 'A Journey'. A pre-release mock-up, perhaps?

Dave B

Was Mr Blair's period in office "an important premiership"?

He was quoted yesterday as saying he thought New Labour would come to be seen as "a great reforming government". I don't see it. Other than 10 years of laws-for-headlines, what did they achieve?

Richard of York

Own goal or faux pas
should it not read in A caustic piece?
This coming from a foriegner with poor spelling....hang your head Mr Hoskins.

Vulture

It's all about Me. Or rather, him.

An ego the size of the Albert Hall enclosing a brain that's rather smaller.

Can we now hope that him and his loathsome, greedy spouse can leave us alone for a very long while and withdraw to one of their nine properties, there to stew in their own rancid juice. I do hope so.

Chris

Dorky, wtf are you on about?

Norman Dee

Having a coffee after shopping at Leclerc, I looked up to see copies of "Voyage" by Monsieur Tony Blair on sale at their book shop, it will be interesting to see how many fly off the shelves here in rural France

dearieme

Anderson complains about bad writing and then perpetrates this horror: "Prime ministers send soldiers into combat." No, Presidents send soldiers into combat. Prime ministers send them into action.

dearieme

" I thought the man was supposed to be intelligent?" What on earth gave you that impression?

Richard of York

Peter
sneaky correction without aknowledgement of your error....honourable journos are rare but even more so on the spectator it seems.

ollie

This is further evidence that the left wing brain cannot produce craft. Blair is at least the soulless automaton Brown was.

Austin Barry

I was appalled by Blair's lauding of his friendship with the evil Adams and McGuinness.

What kind of acrobatic moral accommodation brought him to that point?

A rather sad and pathetic man, really.

Barry Bilge

In light of Blair's revisionist history on Diana and Dodi, and similar questionable claims regarding his knowledge of where the UK economy was going, perhaps we should also look at his claim that he was moments away from ordering an RAF jet to shoot a passenger plane down.

His version of events is that the 'fighter jet was airborne' and awaiting his decision. The RAF have scrambled many times since September 2001 in response to bomb threats, communication problems and to intercept Russian bombers and they scramble two at a time.

Marcus Cotswell

Matthew Parris has it right in The Times today: it reads as if Blair narrated it into a dictaphone and someone's just written it up verbatim. It's a stream of consciousness with no serious attempt to impose formal sentence structure on it.
It comes as no real surprise that the man can't write - he is and was, first and foremost, a performer rather than a scribe. It is a pity, though, that his publishers saw fit to adopt such a light-touch editorial approach.

Tankus

@dearieme "" " I thought the man was supposed to be intelligent?" What on earth gave you that impression?""

$60m in the bank in 3 years and not getting trialled in the Hague in the process !....successfully deceived a large element of the public for 13 year's

Not a total muppet , perhaps

AndyinBrum

So god told him it was the right thing to do to invade Iraq. How is that different from the suicide bomber who has been told by god to use his Semtex vest in a crowded tube.

Oh wait, none, it's deluded messianic horse shit

Robert Eve

What reputation is that?

Tiberius

Didn't someone once say that Christ was either the Son of God or a madman? For many the jury is still out.

As for Blair, can anyone be in doubt?

Maggie

He suffers from the same delusions as Cherie. He thinks everyone experiences life, and makes the same responses to situations, in exactly the same way as him. Cherie presumed to give advice on how to conduct themselves to Sarah Brown and Michelle Obama, both of whom knew far better than Cherie how to behave.
Blair is an example of how not to do things but he presumes he is some sort of role model for world leaders. He is completely insane.

john mounsey

I thought Richard of York had quit these shores to put up deckchairs in Florida. Plainly he's back and the sun must have gone to his head because his two comments posted on this site make no sense at all. Happy daze, Richard?

Marcher Baron

"That photo is fake, or staged at least." Just like the whole Blair charade, Rob.

Fiona

I suppose any old twit can win three elections in a row, but it takes a real man, a man of vastly superior intelligence and talent, to churn out a comment piece or a book review.

Isn't that right, Bruce?!

Maggie

"Fiona", Tony Blair won three elections because the Tory Party kept installing unelectable leaders - just like the Labour Party are about to do now. It wasn't due to a belief in his competence or his imagined popularity. If there'd been any half decent alternative the electorate would have been off like a shot.

Baron Pippin II

the man ranks amongst the best actors in a country that breeds such creatures in their thousands, his placing amongst politicians doesn’t bear thinking about, it’s below the bottom end of the scale. His winning for the first time counts for little. Brown or a cuddly fluffy monkey would have done it, too, what with the disreputable Tories running out of steam on policies, taking off their pantaloons far too often. Bribing the electorate with fake economic growth enabled him to win again twice, we are about to pay dearly for the insanity of the ‘no boom or bust’ years, of which he and the other Scottish political no-entity were the architects of.

for him, the Labour party was but a conduit for his and his hideous wife's only ambition in life – personal enrichment. He would have flogged his mother if there was a market for mothers of spinning, mendacious, morality devoid, greedy actors. It wasn’t going into Iraq to topple a tyrant, he should apologize for, it was his lying about why we should go in that’s unforgivable.

and don’t let me start on his Christian faith.

Fiona @ 3.51:

yap, that’s right, just scan the above, will you please.

Simon Stephenson

Fiona : 3.51pm

Bruce Anderson has been writing for a living for a good many years. Tony Blair hasn't.

I would have thought the Anderson was well qualified to comment on Blair's competence in writing a book, even if he is not qualified to comment about his competence at winning general elections. Wouldn't you?

Or has Blair become to you so much of a deity that you think it's impossible for mere mortals to discover anything about him that is deserving of criticism?

Simon Stephenson

Maggie : 2.52pm

I think that at some stage in his life Tony Blair has had the realisation that humility is a piece of baggage that, if discarded, can allow a human being to be hyper-effective, and fulfilled as a result of this. Never look back. Never accept the frailty of your own humanity. Never allow yourself to consider that way your own view of the world has been determined may be dramatically different from other people's.

I suspect that Gordon Brown shares much of this pathway to, first, coveting power, and then dealing with it once it has been attained, and that the psyches of these two recent Prime Ministers are far, far away from anything that can be constructed with humility as a required element.

Both of them are irredeemable, and that's just something we will have to live with. Neither of them will ever admit to being fallible, because their characters won't allow them to. We need to ignore their remonstrations because these are not based on objectivity.

ian boyd

Always a man to plan ahead, Blair's packaging up in 'A Journey' the first files for his canonization. I think we can assume that the final and compulsory miracle will be that the rat will have gotten away with it all.

Ian Stewart

Yes, Blairs book is bad, very bad. Have you tried wading through Norman Tebbits' apologia? Well nigh impossible, apart from some good descriptions of flying Lightning fighters.

stephen maybery

The Journey, plus a few porkies picked up along the way.