Tony blair

In a recent interview Keir Starmer dropped the B-bomb and Labour members are all a chatter about what it means. Speaking to the Financial Times the Labour leader said his party should be ‘very proud’ of what it achieved under Blair and Brown. As part of Labour’s campaign to regain power for the first time since 2010, Starmer believes the party should remind voters of the good it did when in government, and point out Labour’s successes in reducing poverty, improving the prospects of children and tackling climate change. This might seem a reasonable thing for the Labour leader to say. But for some on the far left of the

Michael Gove was deployed to the Commons on Monday afternoon to answers questions on the ministerial code, an hour-long appearance in which he was (inevitably) asked about that day’s Daily Mail splash: ‘Boris: Let the bodies pile high in their thousands’. An awkward question for any minister to handle, you might think, but the oleaginous Gove just about got away with it. Asked directly about the reports, the Cabinet Office minister gave a lengthy reply which contained this key passage to wriggle out of trouble again: Tens of thousands of people were dying. The Prime Minister made a decision in that meeting to trigger a second lockdown. He made a

We’ve known from the data from phase three trials that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines have good efficacy against symptomatic cases of Covid-19. The data also hinted at near 100 per cent efficacy against serious illness, although the limited numbers of participants made it hard to be sure.  This morning, however, comes real world data showing the vaccines have all but eliminated hospitalisations. According to figures obtained by the Daily Telegraph, 74,405 people were admitted to hospitals across the UK between September 2020 and March 2021. Of these, just 32 were people who had received a vaccine at least three weeks earlier. The figures don’t reveal whether or not there

The government is starting to have an opinion poll problem, but it has nothing to do with any great threat from Keir Starmer or the Labour party. While the Tory ratings have gone from high to low 40s and Boris Johnson is not as extraordinarily popular as he was in January last year before the advent of the first dry cough of coronavirus, that’s not the issue of concern at all. On the contrary, the problem is that the Prime Minister may be getting addicted to favourable ratings and increasingly unwilling to put them in jeopardy by taking difficult or unpopular decisions. The latest evidence for this view came in

When the Prime Minister mentioned ‘Covid status certification’ as part of his route back to normal life, one man must have enjoyed the moment. For Tony Blair it was yet one more little victory in his UK comeback tour, made all the sweeter because Boris Johnson was once a principal opponent of the idea of any ID card system. Blair has been pushing vaccine passports like nobody’s business. A recent paper published by his Institute for Global Change advocated that we carry ‘digital health passports’ on our smartphones, which we could scan on entry to bars, theatres and other places. If you don’t have a smartphone, the paper suggested, the

Boris Johnson’s political recovery in the last couple of months has been nothing short of remarkable. Not that he was ever down and out, of course, but having got a Brexit deal that both Farage and Starmer backed, followed by the success of the vaccine rollout, the Prime Minister once again looks unassailable.  As for the Labour leader, things look much less rosy. But what hasn’t been said in the criticism of Starmer is that what has mostly caused the leader of the opposition’s dip is not his own incompetence but the Prime Minister’s recent good form. This has made me realise something about Boris: he bears a lot of comparison with one former prime

Matt Forde, the stand-up comedian and presenter of his regular Political Party Podcast, has hit on an overlooked technique for getting the most out of big-name interviewees. He pretends to know nothing. Wide-eyed and star-struck (actually he is neither), Forde puts them at their ease in conversation with an apparent fanboy ingénue. ‘Do keep up, Matt,’ said Peter Mandelson, affectionately, as in his Christmas holiday interview Forde claimed to be unaware of some half-forgotten political turbulence that Lord Mandelson, his star interviewee, once encountered. It worked a treat. Lord Mandelson is normally a wary interviewee, but with Forde I have never heard him so unguarded: more confessional even than in

Tony Blair has made a tentative return to the heart of British politics by offering Matt Hancock strategic advice on the vaccine rollout. But does the former prime minister’s ambition stretch further than this? More than a decade after leaving office, Blair is said to keen on a ‘De Gaulle style comeback’. For Blair’s critics, it’s an apt comparison. De Gaulle was the so-called ‘father of Europe’, who led Free France during the war years of the Vichy government. He later disappeared into the political wilderness after 1946 before staging a dramatic return a little over a decade later, eventually becoming president for ten years. So could Blair emulate De Gaulle? You can

‘Terms and conditions will apply.’ That, or something near it, was Dan Rosenfield’s initial response when Boris Johnson invited him to become Chief of Staff in No.10. Naturally, Mr Rosenfield was tempted. But he wanted assurances that he would have the authority to run a serious political outfit. He was not interested in becoming a zoo-keeper. That was not a problem. The zoo has been closed down. The Dominic Cummings era is over. Boris’s willingness to hire a completely different character, following the appointment of Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, suggests that the PM can recognise and value seriousness in others, even if he

Dominic Raab – ‘Swift decisive action’ needed on new quarantine rules The government updated its rules on foreign travel yesterday so that anybody returning to the UK from Spain has to self-isolate for 14 days. The new guidance reflects the discovery of 971 new coronavirus cases in Spain in one day, prompting fears of a second wave in the country. Sophy Ridge interviewed the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and asked him to justify the rapid imposition of the new quarantine guidance: SR: Why was the decision taken with so little notice? DR: …We took the decision as swiftly as we could. We can’t make apologies for doing so. We must

Boris Johnson is to ‘take personal charge’ of a new crackdown on crime and gangs. So reports Steve Swinford of the Times, one of the Lobby’s best reporters. While this is a good and new story, for a jaded and ageing ex-hack like me it crystallises a vague feeling that’s been nagging at me for a few weeks and prompts this realisation: Boris Johnson is turning into Tony Blair. These days Blair is often remembered as the quintessential metropolitan liberal politician, a champion of globalisation, economic openness and, above all, the EU. I became a Lobby reporter in 2001 and my memory of the Blair government that I covered is

Not content with agitating against democracy with his relentless Remainer shenanigans, now Tony Blair appears to be aiming his fire at freedom of speech. Seriously, is there no civilisational liberal value this man doesn’t want to take down? A new report for Blair’s think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, says hard-right groups should be subjected to censorship even if they are not involved in any kind of violent activity. The report says the government should draw up a list of ‘designated hate groups’ — you mean a blacklist? — and these designated groups should be prevented from appearing in media outlets or engaging with public institutions. The report

Tony Blair – No deal ‘potentially devastating’ for Northern Ireland Sophy Ridge began the morning with a wide-ranging interview with Tony Blair. The conservation inevitably turned to Brexit, something to which the former Prime Minister has long been opposed. Blair strongly criticised those politicians calling for a ‘no deal’ outcome after March 29th, arguing that they had ‘played fast and loose’ with the Northern Irish peace process from day one: Politicians are "playing fast and loose" with the peace process in Northern Ireland. Former prime minister Tony Blair tells #Ridge a no-deal #Brexit would be devastating for NI. He says no one could "responsibly" propose a no-deal Brexit: https://t.co/LAn85tyQGL pic.twitter.com/VD2K0rfPFs

One of the bitterest divides in British politics right now is between advocates of a second referendum and those who favour the Norway option. They both want to be the last alternative standing to no deal; and are happy to trash each other in the process. On Politics Live tonight, Tony Blair, the most prominent advocate of a second referendum, laid into the Norway option. He derided it as a ‘pointless Brexit’, as it would leave the UK following the rules of the single market but with less say in how they are made. Nick Boles, the principal Tory advocate of Norway plus, then hit back in his own interview