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“... He was wrecked with grief. Trimble should have entered the Assembly, if only formally to withdraw. Blair and Ahern, for all their heroic devotion, mishandled the talks late on when they kept setting deadlines. A bad mistake. I care about all this, but what’s also on my mind is my ignorance of how actually to open an oyster. I call on Aubs and give him a ...”

“... to the Hutton Inquiry concerning Andrew Gilligan’s reporting on the Today programme of the Blair government’s ‘sexed-up’ Iraq dossier.The phrase is useful because it expresses something of the BBC’s relationship – in the minds of its senior staff at least – to the nation. It is portable between controversies. It underlines the ...”

“... there is one remarkable case in which the judge sets out in detail the then prime minister Tony Blair’s privately expressed exasperation at the UK’s inability to ship a suspect back to Egypt to be interrogated by the security apparatus of one of his holiday friends, Hosni Mubarak. This simple guarantee against serious ill-treatment has not ...”

“... plans of action from his work as failures or travesties. It is fun to imagine his reaction to Tony Blair’s claim that News from Nowhere was the inspiration for New Labour. But even trying to predict what he would have hated about the present says more about us than him. Not long before Blair took ...”

“... Yet the year after the razing of Grozny, Putin was in Genova, smiling for the cameras alongside Tony Blair, Romano Prodi, Silvio Berlusconi, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder (now the chairman of Rosneft), while beyond the wire of the heavily fortified G8 compound, the carabinieri shot dead Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old protester, and ran over his ...”

“... act if a left government, of a nation less hopelessly enfeebled than post-Pasok Greece or post-Blair-and-Brown Britain, dared, say, to resist TTIP’s final promulgation of the neoliberal rule of law. Certainly the relevant point of comparison for the 17 million Leave votes is the No to ‘austerity’ registered by the Greeks, again in the face of all ...”

“... go back and he goes wildly over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two cheeks of the same arse. It’s all so sixth-form, the prefects in revolt. 14 July. Letter this morning saying the Tokyo production of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in ...”

“... not much,’ Julian said. ‘Ingratitude.’ ‘Well,’ Julian said, ‘if Tony Blair – a war criminal – can get £120,000, I should get at least £1 more than him.’ ‘You want me to write back to them and say you want more money?’ ‘Yes,’ said Julian. Later, Julian was on the phone trying to instruct Alan Dershowitz ...”

“... way to Labour’s ‘Scottish Raj’, as Jeremy Paxman put it in March 2005. Paxman’s target was Tony Blair’s ‘attack dog’ John Reid, a Glaswegian former Communist who, having enjoyed the hospitality of Radovan Karadzic in 1993, now concentrates on bullying civil servants in the Home Office. The Scottish Raj has included ...”

“... of any kind, moral anarchy takes over and the rule of the self prevails.’ This, perhaps, is Tony Blair’s form of Anglo-Catholicism, in which right conduct becomes, in Arnold’s phrase, three-quarters of religion. Blair has said that he had some respect for John Major’s Back to Basics campaign. But the actual ...”

“... failed to be elected president. The most important figure in his Oxford years was the dashing Tony Crosland, two years older, with whom he had a passionate relationship for a while, and with whom he maintained a close and at times rivalrous friendship until the latter’s early death in 1977. Crosland was the more obviously brilliant of the two, with more ...”

“... all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the styles was being refought, sort of. The protagonists were united in one bias: they loathed everything ...”

“... are the last people to believe those myths. In Scarface, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer) tells Tony Montana (Al Pacino) not to get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in ...”

“... Saif al-Islam emerged within the regime. It was the fashion some years ago in circles close to the Blair government – in the media, principally, and among academics – to talk up Saif al-Islam’s commitment to reform and it is the fashion now to heap opprobrium on him as his awful father’s son. Neither judgment is accurate, both are self-serving. Saif ...”

“... and the idea of the fire brigade as a last line of defence. But that began to change during the Blair era and there has been a flurry of reductions in the fire service. ‘Knightsbridge Fire Station has closed,’ Matt Wrack told me. ‘Kensington Fire Station has lost a fire engine. Half the fire cover within four miles of Grenfell Tower has gone in the ...”