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“... 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 ...”

“... though he does note that anagrams can reveal the villain within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than ...”

“... left, right and centre, that we have to step in and get things back to sensible levels. But it was Blair’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, who capped the legal aid budget, moved to fixed instead of hourly fees and let some areas of law, like personal injury, fall out of legal aid to be replaced with ‘no win no fee’ deals: little snips that have caused ...”

“... scientific breakthrough of the century – perhaps of all time’ and announced an agreement with Tony Blair stipulating the essential openness of scientific knowledge: We have a profound responsibility to ensure that the life-saving benefits of any cutting-edge research are available to all human beings . . . Our genome, the book in which all human ...”

“... his cover, he began to receive regular visits from British intelligence. He felt betrayed: ‘When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.’ Britain had lost its ‘democratic virginity’ to ‘the American cowboy’. Later that year he returned ...”

“... of the Global South pressed for a ceasefire, but the Bush administration (and, of course, Tony Blair) vetoed it, giving Israel ample time to pursue its stated goal of destroying Hizbullah and killing its leaders.But even full-scale bombardment failed to stop Hizbullah firing its rockets. The IDF had to send in troops, and they were shocked by the ...”

“... One aspect of Tony Blair’s memoir was under-celebrated when it was published last year: its remarkable handling of style.* For a 700-page book that was written in a hurry, A Journey’s register is very carefully judged. (Even the grammatical errors are impressively consistent: ‘The weeping and gnashing of teeth is pointless’; ‘The manifesto and the mandate was one for New Labour’; ‘I was reasonably settled in my mind that two terms was enough ...”

“... clear lessons to take from the first twenty years of the Greater London Authority. Established by Tony Blair in 2000 after fourteen years during which London had no city-wide government, it bears many of New Labour’s hallmarks, including an idiotic preference for the trappings of American administration. It concentrates all effective power, and there ...”

“... Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He may have wanted to get the book out quickly while Iraq, WMDs and Hutton still dominate the headlines, but, more important, writing exclusively about the Blair second term allows him to construct a narrative of political disillusion shorn of awkward questions about the compromises that had been necessary for him to stay loyal to the New Labour ‘project’ before 2001 ...”

“... blairing in 1858 as ‘polishing into correctness and smoothness’ (after the philosopher Hugh Blair, 1718-1800), which seems closer to the mark. Perhaps the Penguin compilers should also have reached for their Robert and looked up the French verb blairer, as in je ne peux pas le blairer (‘he gives me the creeps’). Those easily offended should on no ...”

“... decades. What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign generated a mass movement that renewed the base of the Labour Party ...”

“... especially the Sun, had played a central role in beating Labour in the 1992 general election. When Blair took over as leader in 1994, he had an overwhelming sense that he needed to court the press, in particular the party’s traditional enemies on the right. As he said in 2000, Under Thatcher . . . they got drunk on the power she let them wield and then ...”

“... were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft ...”