The only readable part of Tony Blair’s Lawrentian romp of a memoir, is the
epilogue. He explains why the state must be trimmed in the future and how globalisation is affecting global polities, and all expressed with languid charm and an air of self-deprecation which he
has acquired on the road to riches. No wonder he’s the toast of Washington, the UN and Beijing – he’s the model of the Modern English Gentleman, a real pukka sahib.
Gordon Brown, meanwhile, has travelled to the UN to attend a meeting on tackling poverty. After a decade of enduring Bono at his most self-righteous, poverty is not yet history. Aid agencies and campaigners, wary of aid fatigue, are asking what went wrong. It seems that humanity could not realise its expectations. According to aid specialist Phil Vernon, the Millennium Development Goals were ‘laudable but the wrong measures’.
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