[…] the SIS officer, now Baroness Ramsay, and Donald Dewar, I am informed, had a similar relationship with former MI5 D-G Stella Rimington.(1) The key people in the Blair faction are all securely integrated into the Anglo-American foreign policy system(2) and are no more likely to challenge the British secret state than they are to […]
[…] without ever having to take responsibility for what they’ve said. Or not said. In a universe of anonymous sources, we’re increasingly informed by ‘creative’ writers like Jason Blair at the Times, Stephen Glass at the New Republic, Jack Kelly at USA Today, and Woodward’s own protégé at the Post, Janet Cooke. Not surprisingly, the […]
[…] City’s failures to think into the future on such projects , the narrowness of the financial establishment, the “capitalist, inward-looking City-establishment”. There are obvious echoes here of Blair, leading the wrong party; and, like Heath, trying to drag the party along with him. But I didn’t get this to read yet another account of […]
[…] Halliburton). They should sort out the problem. Lloyd’s (Rio Tinto) prize-winning essay, ‘Right and Left to Right and Wrong’, reminisced about his days with the young Tony Blair expelling ‘the militants’ from the Hackney Labour Party. It also made great play of the massive shifts with the withdrawal of Clause Four: but how serious […]
[…] a favour to a criminal. Inevitably, the riots took an incoherent and reactionary form, with the graffiti along the Shore Road now equating Peter Hain and Tony Blair with the IRA, and the racist targeting of a Chinese takeaway leading to the burning of Sammy Wilson’s DUP offices next door. While UVF supporters attacked […]
[…] 1971-1973. ‘Old Labour’ did OK. It was just a shame it didn’t have a better leader. Some of the Callaghan obituaries claimed that he was consulted by Blair on some issues. There is no evidence of this. Blair, paying tribute, said that Callaghan was a ‘giant of the Labour movement’. While this may have […]
[…] The fruits of this system are still very much alive in the UK. Despite his image as a moderniser of both British politics and social attitudes, Tony Blair is a typical product of it. As a politician, he depends upon the skills of an advocate, rhetoric and persuasion, rather than analysis, upon charm rather […]
[…] the Sun, which went around the world as an ‘exclusive’. It will be remembered by many overseas not for the sun-drenched image of a post-invasion youthful-looking Mr Blair, but because the same photograph included a large impression of the soles of his shoes, a cultural gaff in some countries, symbolic of treading on ‘unholy’ […]
[…] make Ayer a peer. In the Lords Ayer would no doubt have performed similar services for the government as Meta Ramsay is now thought to provide the Blair administration. Having later to settle for a knighthood, left Ayer with a life-long detestation of Harold Wilson. This whole Camden Town social group felt, though they […]
Hugo Young Macmillan, 1998, £20 I cannot stand Hugo Young. He is a long-winded, pompous arsehole whose columns in the Guardian are mostly a waste of paper and ink. But he has his uses, notably as a mouthpiece for the Foreign Office. In this book he has revealed in infinitely greater detail than before the … Read more
