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“... which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting of the parliamentary party. The chairman, Tony Lloyd, opened with a little pep talk, remarking that there was ‘a duty on us collectively not to give into despair’. (Yes, that’s how bad it is.) Then Gordon, eyes half-closed with fatigue, spoke. This was Gordon like I’ve never seen him before. He ...”

“... themselves. That is, it was enough until the arrival on the scene of James Goldsmith and Tony Blair. It is a sign of how little referendums have in common with fully democratic politics that a one-man, one-note band like Goldsmith’s anti-federalists were able to call themselves the Referendum Party and get away with it. (Emboldened by ...”

“... Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in 1992. That defeat didn’t breathe new life ...”

“... Jeremy Paxman, Humphrys is frequently criticised for his aggressive interview technique. But if Tony Blair is capable of turning Paxman’s savagery to his own advantage – he did well in his encounter with Paxman before the invasion of Iraq, for example – he invariably loses when he clashes with Humphrys. This may be in part because the prime ...”

“... in the face of the most extravagant and impertinent opposition from US power monopolies, of the Blair Government’s attempts to encourage the coal industry by curbing the growth of gas, proof of the second. Yet for some reason, thanks at least in part to the abject performances of the Conservative Party, the Government did survive. One of the few political ...”

“... Telecom and thus restore public control over a monstrous private monopoly? Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. To Gould’s fury they stipulated that ‘all mention of state ownership had to go.’ The ‘Two Bs’ did not get their way on that occasion, but they were already embarked on a journey in precisely the opposite direction from that laid down by ...”

“... heritage and political instincts. They can be found in any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who ...”

“... but the real and enduring scandal is the power of money in British politics. Cameron, like Tony Blair and many others, saw nothing wrong in selling his access to the highest bidder. Britain’s political culture appears intensely relaxed about perceptions of cronyism and nepotism. Corporate donations grease the wheels for lucrative public ...”

“... the world detests us because of it. It’s an odd, poisonous notion for a people to carry around. Tony Blair came over to the US, where some people still like him. He’s getting to look more and more like Steve Bell’s caricature. I liked it better when he was feeling more himself – the evil head boy, half-sadist, half-sycophant. Bush is clearly the ...”

“... Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry ...”

“... normal circumstances, the Polaris fleet was not quite ‘our independent nuclear deterrent’, as Tony Blair described it in his foreword to the December 2006 White Paper on the renewal of Polaris’s replacement, Trident. The Nassau statement goes into some detail about the use of the Polaris force ‘for the purposes of international defence’: it ...”

“... be much better at knowing when to give up. It’s not a matter of life or death, certainly, though Blair talks so portentously about putting his job on the line you could be forgiven for thinking it was. Indeed, the implication that the most he has to sacrifice is his job tells you more than you might want to know about his (and many other ...”

“... the war, and her reasons for leaving the government. She also suggests it would be no bad thing if Tony Blair were to resign. It occurs to me, however, that the prime minister’s opponents who believe he ought to quit are labouring under a misconception: that resignation is still a way of admitting to having done something wrong, or at least to having ...”

“... had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s. Tony Blair is not much given to joking. The three memorable gags of his career have come as it nears its end. It’s interesting, in a person who likes to look serious even when he smiles, that they take him to the brink of buffoonery. The assertions, after ...”

“... elections was not a success. Accusing the Tories of having no policies didn’t work either. ‘Tony Blair says it’s all style and no substance,’ Cameron told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed Pot.’ On issues ranging from civil liberties to aviation, Labour ...”