Tony blair

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The best publicity Brown is ever likely to get

Brown is very lucky to have a friend in Piers Morgan. He did him a great service in the ITV interview tonight – and while it would have made CoffeeHousers nauseous (if they watched it), it will be the best television the PM will get this year and probably ever. Mark my words: the Labour Party will not produce anything that shows Brown in such a sympathetic light. It was powerful, I’d say, because it was not party political propaganda: Morgan genuinely likes Brown and did his utmost to project the human side of him. Those hours of coaching from Alastair Campbell paid off. He kept smiling in a credible

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The rebirth of history

We have Francis Fukuyama writing a cover piece for us this week, revisiting his ‘End of History’ thesis. When he first published it, in 1989, he anticipated what was to become a consensus shared by many, including myself: that autocracy was on the way out. Communism had failed, and was being supplanted by the free society (aka the free market). Capitalism was creating wealth and liberty, and from Minsk to Gdansk people wanted it. Eastern Europe was managing a transition brilliantly. Fukuyama¹s thesis seemed to sum up an incredible spirit of optimism. Perhaps this optimism turned to hubris. After 9/11 Tony Blair and George Bush wanted to accelerate history, and

David Blackburn

Lance Price: Brown became PM when his skills were declining

Gordon Brown is a creature of habit. Every morning at 7:30 he holds a telephone conference with his cabal of Shakespearean fools, who review the papers for him. I imagine a scene of domesticity, of coffee and muffins, an adoring wife and child milling about offering tactile affection – a hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the head. But then again Brown is a latter day John Knox and this morning he must have sat in pale fury as an aide summarised the extract from Lance Price’s latest book, published in the Independent. Price, Andrew Rawnsley and Peter Watt share the same lexicon. ‘Unforgivable’, ‘not a nice place for

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Blair on Chilcot...

…well, sorta.  5:25 into his interview with Mike Huckabee, our former PM gives his take on the constant stream of Iraq inquiries: You can certainly see his point. Although I doubt the government will be too impressed with Blair trawling through all the Iraq stuff on American television, only weeks before he hits the campaign trail for Labour. Hat-tip for the video: Comment Central

Sunday

David Blackburn

Beyond doubt

For a moment, Andrew Marr had Alastair Campbell by the short and curlies. Marr attacked (that verb is not an exaggeration) Campbell over his clarification to the Chilcot Inquiry, the phrase ‘beyond doubt’ and the possibility that Blair knowingly misled parliament over the strength of WMD intelligence.   Marr was at his incisive and dramatic best. It was the first time I’ve seen Campbell under pressure and he wobbled, his lower lip did so markedly. Perhaps I do him a disservice, but I didn’t buy Campbell’s blubbing act; it was just theatre. His defence of Blair and himself rested on the tried and tested refrain that Tony’s a pretty straight

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Brown and Blair, together again

Strange that there’s really only one major political point arising from Gordon Brown’s interview in the Standard today.  But, then again, maybe that is the point.  Like the PM’s interview with the News of the World a few weeks ago, the emphasis is far more on the personal than anything else: his relationship with Sarah Brown, the death of his daughter Jennifer, his upbringing, and so on.  We even learn why his handwriting is so bad (“due to the way he was taught to write at school,” apparently).  And with a TV appearance alongside Piers Morgan in the schedules, it does seem that Brown is keen to present a more

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The Iraq War may or may not have been a crime – but was it in the national interest?

If you read the press after Clare Short’s testimony to the Iraq inquiry you would be forgiven for believing that there are only two ways to judge the Iraq War – whether it was legal or not, and whether Tony Blair lied. But while these are important issues, they get in the way of another key question: was it in Britain’s interests? There are many problems with looking simply on the issue of legality. First of all, international law is not domestic law. It is a framework without an overarching “sovereign”, so “enforcement” of international law is different than in the domestic context. International law is also based, at least

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Stop these excuses: someone dig up Robin Cook

So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying, ‘I had to decide, I had to decide.’ And indeed that’s how he behaved. But that is not meant to be our system of government.” The sofa was barred to all except Bush and the Cabinet exercised collective ignorance. Even Brown was left to brood over cups of coffee and macaroons with Clare Short. Short’s

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

It’s striking how Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history, is now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides. This matters politically, because he has – I fear – poisoned the cause of liberal interventionism. I look at this in my News of the World column today. Blair’s Chicago speech of 1999 laid out what I regarded as a bold and coherent foreign policy case. It was time to stop letting genocides happen because they take place within the borders of sovereign states protected by the UN Security Council. I agreed with him when he said that, if the Rwandan genocide happened again, we

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born

If Tony Blair were to go to the newsagents to day to see how his performance is being reported on the front pages,  he’d be in for a pleasant surprise. He does not feature – certainly not in the biggest sellers. The extra-curricular activities of John Terry make the the lead story on the Mail, the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror. Blair himself is relegated to the inside pages on most.  Of all today’s press coverage, The Times is probably the most damaging. “Tony Blair was branded a murderer and a liar last night,”. But even Blair-hating papers like the Daily Mail find it hard to compete

Martin Bright

Tony Blair: The Next Labour Prime Minister?

There has been a general consensus that Tony Blair was a class act in front of the Chilcot Inquiry. Even those who see him as a liar and a war criminal must have been impressed by the way he handled himself – although choosing to show no contrition in a room of people that included the bereaved parents of fallen soldiers was a mistake.  I was not a supporter of the war. Like most people in the country I was an agnostic: I hoped the removal of Saddam would lead to a democratic domino effect across the middle east, but I thought it probably wouldn’t. I thought it far more

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Blair wants to tell Iranian tales

Iran. That’s the news story which poor Mr Blair is trying to spin to the panel – but they don’t pick up on his hints. It would have all been all right in Basra – he’d like to say – if it hadn’t been for those pesky Iranians. As Prime Minister, if he blamed Iran in public then that would have had implications. He’d have had to follow up on it. But now he wants to tell us, or he would if those chaps on the panel would kindly probe him on it. When he was talking to Baroness Prashar he tried to start: “If what you’d ended up having

David Blackburn

Gordon’s off the hook, for the moment

Oooh, there’s just been a wonderful exchange at the Chilcot Inquiry. Baroness Prashar was asking some kindergarten questions about military planning. She barely mentioned Geoff Hoon’s evidence that the MoD was chronically under-funded and short of equipment before, during and after the conflict, and merely concentrated on ‘visible military planning’, or the lack of it to be precise.   Blair is much more assured after lunch than he was immediately before, and gave one of those of those “Trust me, I’m Tony” spiels about the armed forces’ readiness. He added earnestly, “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister,”

David Blackburn

Blair on the rack

Not so good for John Rentoul: it’s WMD time and Blair’s body language spoke volumes. His movements were almost involuntary. The glasses were on and off, the brow furrowed, the head wagged and jagged in the manner of an amphetamine junky going cold turkey, and the hands were more intrusive than Andrew Marr’s. In round one, Blair was as languid as Dirk Bogarde; he was more like Daniel Day-Lewis second time round. That said, the line holds. As Iain Martin notes, it is extraordinary that Blair “didn’t focus a great deal” on the intelligence he received. But he argued, I think fairly, that Hussein’s deliberate obstruction of Blix was suspicious,

David Blackburn

Blair, the Special Relationship and the Clash of Civilisations

So far so good for John Rentoul: Blair’s walking it, but there have been intriguing moments. The suggestion that Blair’s foreign policy was motivated solely by vanity is false. The former Prime Minister’s thinking is extremely coherent. That is not to say that he is right nor to deny his obvious vanity, or to overlook that this may simply be Blair in matinee idol mode. But he subscribes to an ideology. He stated, once again, that he saw 9/11 as an attack on “us”, not just America. The language is redolent of Samuel P. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations. Blair perceives a band of religious fanatics and a crucible of oppresive

Fraser Nelson

A composed and calculated Blair takes round one

So, what do we make of round one? Blair looks younger, in a strange way. A shorter haircut. But all those thespian mannerisms that I had forgotten about are still there – and are being used to full effect. A complete mastery of his facial expressions – which, for Blair, do the communicating. He can torn on anxiety, bemusement etc on tap.The quizzical look, the mock concern. The pause, as he thinks about something (or pretends to). It wouldn’t surprise me if he was faking the slight shaking of the hands which Joey Jones at Sky has just picked up.   We have seen the usual Blair lawyerly hair-splitting habit:

James Forsyth

There were real, human costs to containment

On Today this morning, Nick Robinson said that Tony Blair would point to improvements in infant mortality and the like. Today then cut back to the studio where a reporter analysed this claim. The reporter disputed the validity of this claim and said that sanctions had ‘skewed’ the numbers. But the sanctions were a consequence of Saddam being in power. As long as he was there, there were going to have to be sanctions to contain his ambitions. Dennis Halliday, a UN official who resigned over sanctions, said that four to five thousand children a month were dying because of sanctions. There are intellectually respectable arguments on both the pro

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Blair's real crime

As Tony Blair prepares to sit in the dock tomorrow, I suspect he knows he’ll walk it. The focus is on the case for war and how it was spun – which will be his Mastermind specialist subject. Nor will anything new be uncovered. As one of the journalists whose summer holiday was eaten up by the Hutton Inquiry, I have been getting a sense of deja lu throuhout the Chilcot Inquiry – and Hutton was more informative because he exposed emails written at the time. They had more meaning and impact that the hazy recollections we hear now. The real story is one that Chilcot has unearthed almost accidentally:

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Goldsmith’s advice strikes at the heart of all that is wrong with cronyism

Yesterday, I wrote that Jack Straw’s savagery in response to Goldsmith’s original advice bespoke of personal animosity. That may well be so, but Goldsmith’s testimony reveals that he was long convinced of his initial advice’s validity. Blair was exasperated with his friend’s stubbornness: “your advice is your advice,” he said pointedly. Yet eventually Goldsmith changed his mind. Why? Well plainly the government wanted him to because they thought he was wrong. Chronology is important here. Goldsmith wrote a note to Blair dated 12 January 2003 (three months before the invasion) reiterating his objections. Later in the month and at someone else’s suggestion, Goldsmith met Greenstock, who wanted to put the

Lloyd Evans

An unequal contest

Hague for prime minister? According to one of the wilder Tory theories, a hung parliament could force a humiliated Cameron from office and put the trusted Hague into Number 10 at the head of a coalition government. On today’s showing Hague has lost his hunger for power. With Brown in Northern Ireland on Superman duty, Hague was pressed into service against Harriet Harman. The leader of the house arrived in a stiff tunic of imperial purple decorated with a butterfly brooch whose winged shape divided opinion. To some it suggested a phoenix-from-the-flames, to others a W-shaped recession. Hague had no trouble dominating her at PMQs. And because he knew he’d