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“... and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not automatically translate into success. Tony Blair was not a dominant prime minister: how could he be, having ceded control over large areas of domestic policy to Gordon Brown before he even arrived at No. 10, and then lacking the nerve or political will to claw any of it back? What ...”

“... on the electorate’s view of the government. This is a persistent error of modern politics. Blair spent much of his premiership devising ways in which the Tories could be made to look ‘soft’ on crime, terror and all the rest on the understanding that this was an election-winner for Labour. But there is no historical evidence that any British ...”

“... Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come a long way since it started nearly thirty years ...”

“... analysts: no matter what folly led the US into battle, ‘victory is the only exit strategy.’ Tony Blair has cast the dilemma in apocalyptic terms: the world must do something, or do nothing. This misrepresents the situation on three counts. First, it is not the world but Nato that is acting. Secondly, his framing of the ethical quandary fails to ask ...”

“... order a kipper while thinking about his ‘potted version of Montesquieu’. There’s a bit about Tony Blair wanting to ban the use of calculators in Britain’s primary schools. And yet, Destiny is, like its predecessor, a curiously blighted book, though in a subliminal, difficult-to-place way. Bits of it, like the idea about the models, are ...”

“... is not what it was. The process of opening the NHS to private sector investment began under Tony Blair and has been exploited by successive Conservative governments. If all goes to plan – and any hope that it won’t is fading fast – the collapse will come soon, and mainly American firms will finally get their hands on a chunk of capital that ...”

“... themes and media and sites and forms of attention have been emulsified into a phenomenon on which Tony Blair smiles. Stallabrass follows the tracks of this social monster, which can be identified by what seems to be an infinitely elastic, numbing permissiveness, from mannikins of children with penises for noses and vulvae for mouths to used sanitary ...”

“... only question is, will other countries support this latest initiative by the United States? Before Tony Blair decides, he should consider the negative consequences. A broad right of anticipatory self-defence would introduce dangerous uncertainties. Who would decide that a potential threat justifies pre-emptive action? How does one protect against ...”

“... and Labour voters excited, the SNP keeps agitating for the devolution of yet more fiscal powers. Tony Blair has – accurately enough – described the SNP as ‘a government that’s allowed to behave like an opposition’, though this doesn’t quite capture the party’s apparent bewitchment of an ostensibly pro-Union electorate. The SNP functions ...”

“... until command finds a need for it as justification for political policy.’ The phantom of Tony Blair, brandishing his dodgy dossier, shimmers into sight. Tree of Smoke puts the Vietnam War more explicitly in the context of the wars that went before it. The defining moments of the colonel’s life were his capture by the Japanese in Burma in ...”

“... and his colleagues and published in the Lancet last November, has come in for similar criticism. Tony Blair prefers figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health showing that 3853 civilians were killed between April and October 2004, and his government refers with statistical approval to the Iraqi Body Count Database, which reports 16,352 civilian deaths by ...”

“... then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s ...”

“... that the Daily Express quoted Richards from the book on the subject of the Iraq war: ‘I sent [Tony Blair] a letter saying it was too late to pull out now baby, you had better stick to the guns. If I had spare time I’d go out there and give them a shot or two myself ... I’d terrify them!’ Could I have missed this? There’s nothing in the ...”

“... the Republican right mean there’s now no prospect of the bill being adopted, let alone signed. Tony Blair, in a speech in September, acknowledged that climate change could be ‘so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence’. He identified the rate of change as ‘simply ...”

“... example: the Iraq war. (I know, I know, we have to move on sometime, but this is important.) Tony Blair went to war in the face of widespread (though by no means universal) public scepticism. He justified this course of action on two grounds. First, it was his job to take a lead, even if the public did not like it. The implication here was that the ...”