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
[…] A bit like speaking Latin to the Reverend Iain Paisley. (14) It was another PR opportunity lost. Spook PR and Policing al-Qaida One reason why Prime Minister Blair could have added good manners to Britain’s arsenal in the fight against al-Qaida, is because the government needs the assistance of others to protect our citizens […]
[…] teeth and bent on ‘full spectrum dominance’. As the text for this issue was being finished, the British media was full of stories about disillusion with Tony Blair and New Labour. Just this once I’ll say it: Lobster that is this writer and other contributors – never believed a word of it and […]
[…] only redress is the courts and only the rich can afford libel actions. Unhappy at the response of his own MP, Frank Dobson, he wrote to Tony Blair, when was Leader of the Opposition. To Blair he wrote 13 letters in all. A number of things then happened. Tony Blair called in the police […]
[…] snippets of political gossip; but at £29.50 for 200 pages? 1 See the review of his Thinking the Unthinkable in Lobster 28 p. 33. From Blitz to Blair: a new history of Britain since 1939 ed. Nick Tiratsoo Phoenix (Orion), London,1997, £7.99 pb This collection of essays covering the 1930s through to the arrival […]
I’m still interested in the origins of the invasion of Iraq, the why and the when. At one level this is banal. We know, originally from CBS reporter David Martin, that within hours of the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldt was ‘telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there […]
[…] Spin-doctors (e.g Alastair Campbell) are propagandists. They are not public affairs strategists who prepare for all possible audiences/crises before they happen. The mistake made by Prime Minister Blair and his unelected advisers, including civil servants, was not anticipating that, following the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, rather than a spin-doctor, they needed (public […]
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
[…] hasn’t bought the globalisation-is-wonderful line, and thus the Blairites have to keep him as far away from domestic politics as possible: hence Foreign Secretary. This means that Blair will be most reluctant to see him removed in disgrace as a result of the Sierra Leone affair – or anything else. As a back-bencher Cook […]
David Craig and Richard Brooks London: Constable, 2006, £9.99, p/b When the Blair faction took office in 1997 as ‘New Labour’ we knew that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how […]
