Blog posts tagged "Tony Blair"

June 30, 2009 2:57 pm 21 Comments

Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration. For the promised American pull-out from Iraq [...]

June 15, 2009 9:44 am No Comments

Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian. The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir [...]

June 5, 2009 9:01 am No Comments

Crumbs! An act of personal political courage – or of scheming personal political advancement? At this point almost impossible to judge. I don’t know James Purnell well. He was once a pivotal bag carrier, speech writer and muse inside Tony Blair’s Downing Street. Hence a Blairite, almost certainly well aware of, and wary of, Gordon [...]

June 3, 2009 1:33 pm 52 Comments

A political crisis This is a political spectacle none of us has ever seen before. The government is reshuffling itself. Hazel Blears has just shuffled herself out of the Cabinet. She’d have been fired anyway over her second homery and non-payment of capital gains tax. Two other ministers, one of them another woman, are expected [...]

May 22, 2009 8:30 am 48 Comments

I have been conducting an interesting correspondence with both Tony Blair’s office and the House of Commons commission which is currently dealing with MPs expenses. This follows my posting re. the shredding of Tony Blair’s expenses. A number of UK news outlets – the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail among them – “revealed” that Blair’s [...]

May 18, 2009 3:55 pm 60 Comments

There has still been no explanation forthcoming as to why, amid all the other expenses details to have emerged from the Commons, only one named MP’s expenses seem to have been shredded. It has been reported that other MPs’ expenses were also shredded. But I can only find the name of one MP to whom [...]