Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, said that ‘hardly a day goes by without some new piece of intelligence coming via our security services about a threat to UK interests’; ‘This is a new type of war, fought in a different way by different means,’ he said.
Whatever critics might say about Martin Amis’s Kobra the Dread, his recent book on Stalin’s atrocities, he was certainly right when he pointed out that people are generally indulgent, even flippant, about communist tyrants in a way they would never be about Nazis. This thought strikes me every morning as I walk through Canary Wharf
To watch Tony Blair at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday night was to be reminded that nobody is better at delivering a certain kind of speech. The actual language is unremarkable, and so is the delivery, and so are the jokes. We do not feel ourselves to be in the presence of Demosthenes, or
Turkey has for centuries been a convenient European metaphor for all that is evil, but in truth there is very little that Turkey stands historically accused of which Europe has also not been guilty. Recently, however, M. Giscard d’Estaing – that great and principled defender of democracy, as the people of the Central African Republic
