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“... has moved, sharply, unmistakably if not always consciously, back in the direction of Runnymede. Tony Blair had little interest in constitutional reform, Ted Heath not much more. Yet under them a new pluralism seeped into the governance of Britain. The edicts of the European Commission and the European Court were, as Lord Denning pointed out, an ...”

“... rate. The Bill’s celebration of victimhood astutely catches the mood of the tabloid press: Tony Blair has even suggested that the criminal justice system should be renamed the victim justice system – an idea which threatens to turn criminal justice into a primitive system of personal retribution. To think of the Bill as a victim’s charter is ...”

“... and ‘poodles’ of the US new world order appear that way to Americans. (This includes Tony Blair.) Like it or not, Kouchner’s co-operation with the US has not meant knuckling under to US military might, but rather borrowing it for European purposes, which are often idealistic ones. Consider the interviews Kouchner gave this spring about ...”

“... political anagrams cited by Fowler are great: Shirley Williams is ‘I aimlessly whirl’, while Tony Blair MP decodes as ‘I’m Tory plan B’. There are more recent possibilities he doesn’t explore: Nicholas Clegg’s name suggests he could shift up a gear (‘I’ll change cogs’) or just slow things down (‘chain clogs leg’). Samantha ...”

“... Predictably, the UK initially opted out of anything to do with ‘Social Europe’, but then Tony Blair opted in; at first Cameron aimed to opt out again, but pulled back for fear of losing Labour’s support for Remain. But in any event, ‘Social Europe’ lost all traction after Delors’s exit, which is why social democrats like Wolfgang Streeck ...”

“... A paragraph from the Sun reminds one what rational discourse in this field is up against: ‘Tony Blair was attacked last night for refusing to scrap hated human rights laws. The PM’s buddy Lord Falconer yesterday ruled out any change to the act that frees murderers to kill again.’ These characterisations of the Human Rights Act have not come ...”

“... and misery’ – while reaping its benefits, uncovering a road that led from Thomas Paine to Tony Blair. Settling his account with Marxism required a reckoning with Marx himself. As early as 1979, when Stedman Jones still identified as a socialist, he was exhorting his comrades to ‘de-theologise Marx’. Marxists had produced brilliant readings of ...”

“... allowed his ministers to take whatever side they preferred in the ensuing campaign, in which Tony Benn from Labour and Enoch Powell from the opposition – he had by then left the Tories and joined the Ulster Unionists – campaigned for a No vote. In June 1975, on a turnout of 64 per cent, two-thirds of those who voted – 67 per cent – approved the ...”

“... as the more immediate struggles he faces in Iraq and with his chancellor, that set the tone for Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party Conference last month. He and his advisers have been searching for a way to reconnect with the electorate, so that their triumph next year will seem like something more than a victory by default. One model to which ...”

“... even-handed mistrust of all politicians was a genuine pleasure at the displacement of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have ...”

“... UK, Mann is acutely conscious of the new American solipsism. He places some of the blame for it on Tony Blair, who is depicted as a ‘camp follower’ with a ‘walk-on part’ in Bush’s war on Iraq. Blair placed British soldiers in the service of a foreign power, ‘objectively’ aligning the UK with Ariel Sharon ...”

“... thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and the ...”

“... at the selection meeting was a bit underwhelming – one supporter says ‘he didn’t really have Blair’s panache’ – but it didn’t matter. He won. Ten years later, he’s prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and ...”

“... months before the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported in a secret memo to Tony Blair that he was told in Washington that the US was going to ‘remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. However, because ‘the case was thin, Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD ...”

“... Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of the last hundred years: not even Baldwin or Thatcher quite equals him. Yet the record of his governments has been one of opportunities half-caught or missed entirely, of impulses that were sometimes admirable but rarely acted on, of reasonable but not unusual administrative competence, of some genuinely wrong-headed or shameful policies and, of course, a disastrous adventure abroad ...”