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“... of the mujahideen seriously,’ the speaker continues. ‘Do not listen to the liars Bush and Blair who say that al-Qaida is finished. We are not spokespersons for al-Qaida but we pray in the same direction.’ I notice, at the back of the hall, two men in suits who are not journalists, though one of them holds a notebook. They listen attentively. An ...”

“... Commonwealth countries are richer for their presence.’This was originally written to be read by Tony Blair on a video-link at a commemoration of the Great Famine, funded in part by the Irish Government, which was held in Cork on the June Bank Holiday weekend of 1997, but the plan was abandoned and the apology was read out by the actor Gabriel Byrne. It ...”

“... a possible counterweight to England’s hegemony in the Union. Weight expresses some sympathy for Tony Blair’s efforts to rebrand Britain and kickstart a progressive patriotism (he neglects to mention the memorably awful appearance of Fritz the bulldog in one of Labour’s 1997 election broadcasts). ‘Cool Britannia’ was crass, he says, but well ...”

“... salaries and approaching retirement, can be expected to show more resilience on this issue than Tony Blair’s government did when dealing with the ageing Pinochet. They might even grant Milosevic his wish and call Blair and other Nato leaders as witnesses – an order they might have to obey, since the Yugoslav ...”

“... for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The school was ‘a wonderful inspiration’, Tony Blair had said in 2006, and whatever her errors, Shuter talked to the Today programme in March with exemplary tact about her former pupil Mohammed Emwazi, who’d just been identified as ‘Jihadi John’. Shuter has the right to apply for a rethink on ...”

“... fifth a titled woman, sister to a Cabinet Minister. The principal males, Martin Murray and Gavin Blair Summers, are, Binding informs us, modelled on Stephen Spender and Giles Romilly. Fellow Travellers thinly fictionalises a passage in Spender’s life which he has himself recollected in World within World. In 1933, the poet (in the novel a novelist) became ...”

“... Etienne, which has a capacity of 38,000, there will be a paltry two thousand Scottish supporters. Tony Banks has called the French hosts ‘miserly’, and 22 Liberal Democrat MPs have signed a motion condemning the French authorities. A few more tickets have become available thanks to a contingency fund. While Blair has ...”

“... for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of soft-core irony and hard-core sentiment. But apart from reassurance and a sort of avenging pride, what are these magazines selling to their readers? With their grisly combinations of sensitivity and debasement ...”

“... working for the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out ...”

“... and become more like the electoral machines of their leaders, as is largely the case in America. Tony Blair’s celebrated ‘project’, guided by Philip Gould, dismantled the rambling institutions that formed the Labour coalition and turned Labour into whatever the leader wanted it to be, even, in Blair’s case, a ...”

“... country, and another set of bankers moves in. Not all City types are vile, obviously. My friend Tony isn’t vile. We have many interests in common and chat easily about all sorts of things. But I’m sometimes made aware of a significant gap between us. It’s a philosophical and practical gap, and it is to do with money. ...”

“... been shaped by three factors: the big budget increases it received under the Labour government of Tony Blair in the early 2000s, rescuing the service from 18 years of Conservative neglect and, at the cost of some ruinous public-private mortgages, covering the land with shiny new hospitals; the steady increase in the role of profit-making firms as NHS ...”

“... to a halt in a fraction of a second was subjected to market shocks that had no market solution. Blair’s government had already intervened to slow down the switch from coal to gas; in 2002 it had little choice but to bail out British Energy, the private company that owned the nuclear stations. And there was a deeper, less visible problem. Neta was ...”

“... Clarke (King’s, plus a brief period at the Brookings Institution in Washington), claimed that Blair had been ‘guilty of confused optimism’.After Iraq, a number of senior figures in the British military had misgivings about intervening in Libya in 2011 but the defence intelligentsia didn’t share their concerns. RUSI’s major report on Libya, which ...”

“... in Europe is a frustrating business. In Britain Liberal Democrats can only stand by and fume while Blair’s Third Way steals liberal nostrums and enlists them in the service of a new centrist consensus designed to keep Lib Dems on the margins for ever. In Germany, the liberals have gone from being the king-makers of the Kohl era to bystanders in ...”