Brexit has made for some peculiar bed fellows. So we have Michael Heseltine suggesting that it would be better to have Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street than to continue with Brexit, while Tony Blair is saying the opposite Continue reading What is our future under Brexit?
By some strange trick of fate I ended up watching Tony Blair’s press conference in the wake of the Chilcot report last week. The word that came to mind was “hubris”. It’s from the Greek. It means “arrogance before the … Continue reading Blair’s practised apology was painful to witness
The news this week is that Tony Blair has finally apologised for the Iraq War. Well not quite. This is what he said, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria for CNN: “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong.” This is the mendacious wriggling of a lawyer trying to get himself off the hook. I can clearly remember a counter-dossier, by Alan Simpson MP and the academic and campaigner Dr Glen Rangwala, which reviewed the same intelligence available to the government at the time but concluded that there were no WMDs. Blair would certainly have seen … Continue reading Is Blair beginning to feel the heat over Iraq?
Tony Blair famously employed spin as a way of persuading the electorate to support his agenda. So in the run-up to the Iraq War, Blair successfully spun the intelligence to make it appear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes. It was not an actual lie, but it was nothing like the truth either. David Cameron is nowhere near as sophisticated. He simply tells you what he thinks you want to hear. Before the last election, for example, when asked by David Dimbleby on Question Time if he had plans to cut … Continue reading Honesty is the best policy
You won’t be surprised to learn that I am supporting Jeremy Corbyn as the next leader of the Labour Party. He’s not really a “hard-left extremist”, despite what the media tells you. He is an old fashioned social democrat, like the Labour government of 1945, which brought us the National Health Service and the welfare state, or like current governments in the Scandinavian countries, which have some of the highest standards of living in the world. The only reason he can be portrayed as an extremist is that politics have moved so far to the right in the last thirty … Continue reading Tory with a wilted rose
I’ve just spent the day with my beautiful granddaughter Bella. “Bella” means “beautiful” in Italian. I had a dream about her a few weeks ago. In the dream I was coming down the stairs in a very crowded place. Bella was at the bottom of the stairs, a long way away, but when she spotted me, despite the crowds and the noise, she recognised me immediately and laughed and clapped her hands. It seems like the greatest of privileges to me to have a relationship of trust with a child. The greatest privilege, and the greatest responsibility too. It is … Continue reading Is this the world we want to leave our children?
