Tony blair

Here’s a tip for judges, businessmen, peers, politicians and former PMs who don’t like being called ‘enemies of the people’: stop behaving like enemies of the people. This week it is reported that Tony Blair is polishing his toothy grin to make a comeback into British politics, potentially as thwarter, or just tamer, of the ‘catastrophe’ of Brexit. It’s also reported that Richard Branson, the Brexit-bashing billionaire, has offered ‘tens of thousands’ of pounds to a gang of the great and good who want either to reverse the result of the referendum in which us dumb plebs made such a grave error, or at least insist that a second referendum be

Sir John Chilcot isn’t a man who deals in pithy quotes. His Iraq War inquiry report came in at two-and-a-half million words, and even the executive summary was 150 pages long. Yet Chilcot’s assessment of Tony Blair during his select committee appearance this afternoon was about as damning as he could manage. Asked whether the former PM had damaged trust in politics, Chilcot had this to say: ‘I think when a government or the leader of a government presents a case with all the powers of advocacy that he or she can command, and in doing so goes beyond what the facts of the case and the basic analysis of that can

‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David Cameron in his last week as an MP. History does not look likely to be kind to his great social policy. We should, however, be grateful to the former prime minister for his quixotic attempt to do the right thing on a massive scale. Because in doing so he exposed the fallacy which has dominated

Michael Gove has been keeping himself busy this week with his non-apology apology tour. He came close to saying sorry to Boris Johnson and admitted he made mistakes during the party’s summer leadership contest. But he has saved his biggest about-turn for this morning. In his column in The Times today, the Brexit backer has admitted he’s fallen head over heels for an unlikely person: Ed Balls. Where once the pair traded blows across the despatch box, Gove has now changed his tune and declared his true feeling for his former adversary. He said that ‘against (his) better judgement…I have developed an infatuation with another man’ and went on to say he

Poor old David Cameron. His defeat in the referendum campaign left critics saying he was the worst Prime Minister ever. Now, it seems, it’s not only his legacy which falls short of some of his predecessors. Having quit Parliament, Dave was planning to use the next year to cash in on his memoirs. When his book was first touted, there was talk of the former PM earning a multi-million pound payment. Some said his advance could even match – or beat – that of Tony Blair, who picked up £4.6m for his book ‘A Journey’. Instead, the actual amount Cameron will earn is something of a disappointment. It’s being reported

History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental than the Labour party. The stone monument of Labour history is Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 administration, so any biography of the great man is, inevitably, an intervention into the present state of the party, even if it comes supported with all the best scholarly apparatus. The last major biography of Attlee was Kenneth Harris’s official work, more than 30 years ago, in 1982. There is a neat symmetry to the fact that Harris was writing during the last occasion that the Labour party decided to join hands and walk off a

Tim Farron’s hardest task in his conference speech today was convincing people to actually listen. A test of how successful he was will be how soon into the 6pm news tonight he pops up on screen (following Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s reported split, the signs don’t look good). So what did Farron do to try and get people to sit up? Banging the anti-Brexit drum was one of his main tactics. Farron promised… ‘Not a re-run of the referendum, not a second referendum, but a referendum on the terms of the as-yet-unknown Brexit deal’ The Lib Dem leader did, to be fair, do his best to empathise with those who

Jeremy Corbyn has today announced the launch of the Labour Organising Academy, a new body designed to look at methods of turning the party’s newly engorged membership into an effective campaigning body. In the pamphlet he produced, Corbyn observes that ‘Labour is now Europe’s biggest political party’ and that the ‘party’s membership will transform how Labour campaigns’. The launch of this might feel somewhat hasty. After all, the leadership campaign won’t be concluded until the announcement at party conference in Liverpool on 24 September – but it represents a big change for Corbyn. It is a tacit acceptance of the notion that his supporters are too inward looking, too concerned with

I had been wondering where Gorgeous George Galloway might pop up next. Defenestrated from his seat in Bradford West, humiliated in the London mayoral elections — where he received 1.4 per cent of the vote — and no longer apparently an attractive proposition to the reality TV producers, his public life seemed sadly to be drawing to a close. But nope, here he is with a film about the person all left-wing people hate more than any other, Tony Blair. It’s a good film, too, in the main. The Killing$ of Tony Blair was partly crowdfunded and it may well be that the only people who watch it will be

Ring a ding-ding — here comes the he-bling. Tony Blair started it. The war, that is. On good taste. This summer he was photographed on holiday relaxing in shark-print trunks and gangsta sunglasses under a blue Mediterranean sky. The former prime minister was on a yacht off the coast of Sicily but — uh oh! — what in the name of sunken treasure was that monstrosity moored between his moobs? Closer inspection revealed it to be a giant gold cross, gleaming like a gilded anchor submerged in greying seaweed. Look at the size of that thing! Perhaps it comes in useful for skewering sardines off the grill at a beach

Westminster prefers to concentrate on one drama at a time. That is why the old rule of thumb was that only one party leader could be under pressure at any given moment. Recent events have upended that convention. The Brexit vote precipitated leadership crises for more than one party. But the spectacle of the Tory leadership election has rather overshadowed the fact that Labour is having its own leadership contest. The contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, the party’s former work and pensions spokesman, will run all summer. In Labour circles, Corbyn is regarded as the clear favourite. Once again, the hard left appears to have succeeded in getting

As a founder member of the Guild of Blair-Bashers, someone who reacted strongly against him from our first encounter at dinner when he was only an opposition spokesman, as a commentator who railed against the invasion of Iraq the moment the idea was mooted and right through to the end, and as a journalist who throughout Tony Blair’s time at No. 10 beat my tiny fists against the imposter I always thought him to be, perhaps I may deserve your attention now, after Chilcot, that I have something to say in Mr Blair’s defence? I don’t believe that in any important way the former Prime Minister lied. And I don’t