Search Results

Advanced Search

121 to 135 of 286 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Democratic Warming

Tom Nairn: The Upstaging of the G8, 4 August 2005

... made, and he would subsequently find himself driven to even more exaggerated support for Blair and Brown. Why was the mesmeric trance so crucial, and why did it have to be maintained at all costs? Well, there was a lot behind it: something of the way of the world, as well as the investment of billions in pre-publicity, policemen and stadiums. The threatened ...

Fever Dream

William Davies: Fourteen Years Later, 4 July 2024

... The Global Financial Crisis and the emergency policy responses to it occurred during Gordon Brown’s time in office, but its aftermath has coloured British politics ever since. Nobody knows quite how differently the last fourteen years would have panned out had Brown defeated Cameron and Osborne, either ...

Betting big, winning small

David Runciman: Blair’s Gambles, 20 May 2004

... that set Blair apart from the two other most significant British politicians of the last decade. Gordon Brown is another risk-averse politician, but one who prefers to play for low stakes, endlessly and tirelessly working the percentages to build up his political reserves. Ken Livingstone, by contrast, is a politician who seems genuinely happy to take ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

... left the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten email address. In 2014, he was made a UK crown ...

Politicians in a Fix

David Runciman: The uses of referendums, 10 July 2003

... in particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the ...

William Wallace, Unionist

Colin Kidd: The Idea of Devolution, 23 March 2006

State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 
by Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford, 283 pp., £45, September 2005, 0 19 925820 1
Show More
Show More
... The new Parliament has not attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as ...

Yeltsin has gone mad

R.W. Davies: Boris Yeltsin and Medvedev, 9 August 2001

Midnight Diaries 
by Boris Yeltsin, translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick.
Phoenix, 409 pp., £8.99, April 2001, 0 7538 1134 0
Show More
Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey through the Yeltsin Era 
by Roy Medvedev, translated by George Shriver.
Columbia, 394 pp., £24, November 2000, 0 231 10606 8
Show More
Zagadka Putina 
by Roy Medvedev.
Prava cheloveka, 93 pp., $8, March 2000, 9785771201269
Show More
Show More
... of the rouble put up the price of foreign imports and gave a boost to Russian industry (Gordon Brown please note). The world oil price recovered, and this assisted exports. In spring 1999 Primakov’s popularity rating reached 70 per cent. Yeltsin was anxious to secure a suitable successor in the forthcoming Presidential election. His rating ...

Diary

John Upton: Damilola Taylor, 4 January 2001

... be below the poverty line – more than one in three in 1998/99 compared with one in ten in 1979. Gordon Brown has greatly increased income support to unemployed families with children but Jack Straw’s curfew can only damage the cause of ‘social inclusion’. The Government appears to be finding it increasingly difficult as it approaches an election ...

Time to Repent

Ross McKibbin: The New Political Settlement, 10 June 2010

... easily won a seat which would once have been safely Conservative. The English might think of Gordon Brown as an old curmudgeon but that is not the way his constituents in Fife see him – or if they do they don’t care. There are other indications of ‘federalisation’. All the Northern Irish parties are now in effect nationalist parties. David ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 78396 634 9
Show More
Show More
... to replace Peter Mandelson as European commissioner for trade, after a last-minute decision by Gordon Brown to recall Mandelson to London as a government minister. The post would have been left vacant, but José Manuel Barroso told Brown that Britain could keep the office if he gave it to a woman. Ashton happened to ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
by Lance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
Show More
Show More
... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory ...

My Millbank

Seumas Milne, 18 April 1996

The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? 
by Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle.
Faber, 274 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 571 17818 9
Show More
Show More
... a Westminster cliché, echoed privately by the Shadow Chancellor and one-time Mandelson intimate, Gordon Brown, that Mandelson is Labour’s real deputy leader. His grip on strategy and policy direction, as well as campaigning and presentation, is increasingly tight. When Mandelson mutters that he is unhappy, say, with Labour plans to abolish compulsory ...

Is this the end of the UK?

David Runciman: The End of the UK?, 27 May 2010

... Labour has got the chance for an extended wallow in righteous opposition, having finally dumped Gordon Brown in the process. Have you ever seen such happy politicians? If the voters were trying to punish them for their past transgressions they must be feeling pretty queasy at the sight of all this bonhomie. Next time we are going to have to wield a ...

Searchers, not Planners

Joe Perkins: Globalisation, 7 June 2007

Making Globalisation Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice 
by Joseph Stiglitz.
Allen Lane, 358 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7139 9909 8
Show More
The Next Great Globalisation: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich 
by Frederic Mishkin.
Princeton, 310 pp., £17.95, October 2006, 0 691 12154 0
Show More
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good 
by William Easterly.
Oxford, 380 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 19 921082 9
Show More
Show More
... failure are recognised, it is unlikely that the huge increases in aid proposed by the likes of Gordon Brown, Bono, George Bush and Angelina Jolie will make much difference. Recent discussions about development have centred on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed by 147 heads of state in September 2000. They comprise eight overarching ...

Next Door to War

Tariq Ali: After Benazir, 17 July 2008

Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia 
by Ahmed Rashid.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 7139 9843 6
Show More
Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars within 
by Shuja Nawaz.
Oxford, 655 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 19 547660 6
Show More
Show More
... him were subjected to similar treatment. In January, he wrote an open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice and the president of the European Parliament. The letter, which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions: At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences