Tony blair

One of the things about the press that politicians frequently complain about is that papers concentrate more on personalities than policies. But reading the latest extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries you see just how much personality matters. Indeed, according to Campbell, Tony Blair excluded Gordon Brown from a discussion about what to do after 9/11 not because of any difference about how to respond but because he had become fed up with how difficult Brown was to deal with on a personal level. Now, there are nowhere near the personal tensions at the top of this government that there were in the last one. But because politicians are humans and not purely rational actors, the individual relationships in the government matter.

In 1997 New Labour was not just a domestic programme; it was a foreign policy too. Known as the "Neue Mitte" in Germany, Blair's Third Way soon attracted such converts as the German chancellor, the French prime minister and the Danish leader. In the end, it produced few results for Britain, failing – much as Harold Wilson did in the 1970s – to curry favour for the UK through party political links with other leaders. But for a few years, much as New Labour looked across the Atlantic to the Democratic Party, so Europe's Social Democrats looked across The Channel. International recognition for his deficit reduction plan notwithstanding, David Cameron has no such effect so far. But some have been swayed by his domestic agenda.

Labour's simmering resentments and self-doubts have been boiling over recently — and today is no different. Compare and contrast The Sun's interview with Tony Blair with Andrew Grice's article on Ed Balls in the Independent. For Blair, Labour ought to be claiming more credit for their preparatory role in some of the coalition's reforms, such as the Academies programme. For Balls, they ought instead to be dodging blame for the state of the public finances. As Grice reports, "Ed Balls has rejected demands from allies of Ed Miliband that he admit Labour spent too much when they were in power." From the rest of the piece, the shadow chancellor's position sounds rather like that of John Wayne's Captain Nathan Brittles: "Never apologise.

The Telegraph's publication of all those documents today has got everyone talking about that feud again. Here is what The Spectator's former editor Matthew d'Ancona had to say about the Blair-Brown wars when things were hotting up in the autumn of 2006: The great New Labour civil war, Matthew d'Ancona, 6 September 2006 Two days before David Cameron was elected Conservative leader, I asked one of his closest allies what the founding principle of Cameronism would be. He pondered the question. Would it, I wondered, be something to do with quality of life, the public services, the environment, social justice, nationhood? ‘Our starting point,’ he finally replied, ‘is that the Tory party can never beat Tony Blair.

To an extent, British politics is still determined by whether or not you agree with Tony Blair. For more than a year, the coalition and the opposition have been debating whether to continue Blair’s public service reforms; this is a testament to his failure as Prime Minister as much as it to his success. Today, has given an interview to the Times (£), coinciding with the release of his memoirs in paperback. He uses it to question the Labour party’s current journey back into “nostalgia”. He says: “The attraction of a concept like Blue Labour is it allows you to say that there’s a group of voters out there we can’t reach at the moment, so what we should do is really empathise with their plight.

You may have noticed that Barack Obama came to the country on a state visit this week. But he wasn't the first US President to be extended an invitation from the Queen, oh no. George W. Bush beat him to that particular honour in 2003. Here are a couple of Spectator pieces from the time, the first the magazine's leader column, the second by Peter Oborne: Don't burn Bush, The Spectator, 15 November 2003 The Queen's state carriage has carried some pretty rum types over the years. Nicolae Ceauscescu took a break from murdering his countrymen to take a ride down the Mall in June 1978. In 1994 it was Robert Mugabe's privilege and in 1979 Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi - at a time when Moi's corrupt administration was bleeding his country of £00 million a year.

Academies, as CoffeeHouser knows, are booming. There were around 200 of them when Michael Gove became Education Secretary last May. Now, just a year later, and steaming well ahead of expectations, there are over 600. This is, as Benedict Brogan suggests in his Telegraph column today, one of the great successes of the coalition era — albeit one that owes a debt to Andrew Adonis, Tony Blair and all the school reformers that came before them. And it is a triumph of quality, as well as of quantity. The simple, overwhelming truth is that academies are, on the whole, better than the schools they replace.

‘Constitutional reform is a waste of time, pure and simple. It never actually achieves its avowed end of reconnecting the voters with democratic institutions,’ wrote John McTernan, the former advisor to Tony Blair, recently. There are signs that the current government agrees.   Nick Clegg has unveiled the next stage of his constitutional reforms today by revealing draft plans to reform the House of Lords. The coalition speaks in unison in public: the Cabinet discussed reform last and apparently there was “very strong support for the proposals around the table”. But dissenting voices must have sounded in private.   The inestimable Rachel Sylvester reveals (£) that Clegg’s draft is very rough.

A trickle of documents from the Chilcot Inquiry have been released today, among which is the written witness statement of former Europe Minister Denis MacShane. It's rather intriguing. MacShane told the inquiry that it was his understanding that France 'would not leave the US, Britain and other allies alone in any action against Saddam' and that President Chirac then vetoed military action in the UN at the stroke of the twelfth hour, apparently against the wishes of his colleagues and France's political establishment. MacShane says he gained this impression after speaking to a senior French official at the Anglo-French summit at Le Touquet on 4 February 2003, six weeks before the invasion.

This week's Spectator reveals the rather tantalizing fact that Peter Hyman, Tony Blair's former director of strategy, is setting up a Free School in East London. This – I kid you not – is a very good thing. Newham School 21 will teach kids between the ages of 4 and 18 – an ambitious span of ages – and will open its gates in September 2012 if all goes to plan. Whatever you think about Blair, Hyman is a quietly impressive figure, coining the phrase "Education, Education, Education" and then leaving Downing Street in 2003 to become a teaching assistant. Now, as the deputy head of a school in Ealing, Hyman could not be better placed to start a "free school" and his plans have the blessing of those at the very highest levels of Labour politics, I'm told.