Perhaps the most surprising part of Tony Blair’s memoirs is the passage in which he reveals one of his deepest regrets: it’s not Iraq, but the fox-hunting ban. Blair now says that the 2005 reform was ‘a fatal mistake’ and even admits to having been swayed by a metropolitan bias against country dwellers. ‘I started
What is it about international organisations that makes them so impervious to criticism? If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were a British ministry or quango, it is inconceivable that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, would still be in his post. The IPCC’s reports, which have been accepted by governments around the world as a
Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir, A Journey, in which he said that Mr Gordon Brown drove him to drink, but not an ‘excessively excessive’ amount: ‘The curse of Gordon was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir,
I have of late, for the most cheerful of reasons*, been getting up early to work. All well and good — deadlines have been met — but now I can’t break the worm-catching habit. Long before dawn the eyelids flutter open and the brain begins its spinning machine whirl. I force myself to stay in
Only time will tell whether Tony Blair was wise to publish his memoirs. The first Roman emperor Augustus, who came to power in 31 BC after a bloody civil war, abandoned his. His purpose seems to have been to answer his critics, who were accusing him of being a merciless, criminal, cowardly, jumped-up nobody. But
Philip Collins reviews the week in politics Other people’s families are always strange. How much stranger when the idea of a political fight within a family is no longer a metaphor. Ed Miliband recently told of his parents’ journey to England and his gratitude for their refuge here. This dramatic and effective story could have
U and Pre-U Sir: I am, as a student approaching the A2 year, sick with envy at the small number of my friends lucky enough to be currently taking the Pre-University course. Not only did John Witheridge (‘An answer to the A-level debate — and Gary Lineker’, 28 August) succinctly describe the previous year of
