Diary – 14 July 2016

I first met a boyish, sunny Tony Blair more than 20 years ago. Our encounters have always been slightly tense since I reported some clumsy remarks he made about tax when he was still an apprentice PM — and he reacted much as Andrea Leadsom did against the Times last week (though via A. Campbell rather than Twitter). On Wednesday afternoon at Admiralty House he is a stricken caricature of how he was: painfully thin; waxy skin; astonishingly terrible teeth. He is a brilliant actor but not that good: he has been tormenting himself over Chilcot. But he isn’t sorry for the invasion, as he told me, and would do it again if circumstances repeated. His journey from fêted hero in 1997 to perhaps the most isolated man in Britain is a national tragedy. That said, he still knows the tricks. My cameraman Chris told me afterwards that Blair played to an imaginary audience just to his left with a skill and pathos like no other politician.

Later, at the Spectator party, I run into one of Michael Gove’s team, and ask if that now notorious email by Sarah Vine, his wife, was leaked deliberately as part of a fiendish plot to soften people up for his betrayal of Boris. I am shown another message that supposedly proves Vine was being clumsy-fingered and had accidentally sent the incendiary email to a consumer products PR. So was that the source of the leak? It would be a brave PR who would pass such a message on and risk alienating a columnist as formidable as Vine. I suspect we don’t yet have all the jigsaw pieces.

At Wimbledon I run into a hedge-funder, and ask whether Britain is now the Big Short.