Peter Oborne writes for Middle East Eye.
Iain Duncan Smith is fatter and pinker in the face these days, perhaps the result of too many dinners. He is more assertive. Media training over the summer has given him a certain bravado and made him more tactile. He looks people in the eye more often. His handlers were pleased by the way he
There are times when there is no alternative but to throw up one’s hands in despair and just confess that one is not up to the job. A plumber, sent to investigate a problem with the drains, is doing his client a favour if he admits that he cannot identify the cause of the problem.
For a long period in the late 1990s I worked for the Daily Express, a paper which vigorously supported the New Labour government. Once every six months or so Alastair Campbell, sometimes accompanied by Tony Blair, would turn up to give us our marching orders. At the end of one of these meetings I asked
There has been no more abject moment in the Blair premiership than last Tuesday afternoon’s capitulation to the trade unions. The grandees of the movement, led by the new TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, were ushered with some deference into Downing Street. The ambitious Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt, who has spent the past two years
The lightening of Tony Blair’s mood on Sunday afternoon was palpable. For two days, ever since news of David Kelly’s suicide broke during his Far-East tour, the Prime Minister had looked haggard and broken. His voice went miserable and panicky. But the BBC announcement that Dr Kelly was the source for reporter Andrew Gilligan brought
Most prime ministers arrive at 10 Downing Street battle-hardened. Not so Tony Blair. He had an easy ride to the top: the fortuitous arrival as a young MP; his swift emergence as a shadow Cabinet star; the man in the right place when John Smith died. For his first five years in government, this effortless
I was unable to cope when I joined the parliamentary lobby as a reporter for the London Evening Standard more than ten years ago. I faced two problems, both of them disastrous. The first was that I did not know how to recognise a political story. A grand set-piece – the sacking of a minister,
The late Tony Bevins, whose final public act was to resign on grounds of principle as political editor of the Daily Express the moment Richard Desmond bought the paper, was a close student of New Labour. Not long before he died he set out, in a series of articles which still repay close study, its
Later this summer, on 2 August, Tony Blair’s government will reach its most significant milestone yet. It will become the longest-serving Labour government in history, surpassing the record of six years and three months held by Clem Attlee between July 1945 and October 1951. There is no denying the magnitude of the achievement. Tony Blair
This week Tony Blair was warned to brace himself for another huge increase in opium production in Afghanistan. Analysis of a harrowing United Nations report showed that the situation was catastrophically out of control. Inspectors surveyed 134 districts. They learnt that some 23 were planning to plant poppies for the first time in 2003, while
It is remarkable for Britain to be visited by a saint. But that was surely our good fortune last week, when Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, passed through London. This gentle and soft-spoken former goatherd is a man of great holiness. In a country where churchmen have kept quiet, Ncube has consistently spoken out
A photograph was taken of the Blair Cabinet immediately after the 1997 general election. There is a bemused, nervous air about the Prime Minister and his colleagues, as if they had just won the National Lottery but weren’t quite sure whether the cheque had cleared. But there is also a palpable sense of common purpose.
The central proposition behind the government’s public-relations campaign since the end of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair has undergone some mid-life personality enhancement. We are now entreated to believe that the amiable, grinning weathercock to which we had grown accustomed has been replaced by a steely world leader. These claims do not square
The elaborate construction of the story of Tony Blair as lonely war leader, noted here last week, has continued to preoccupy Downing Street strategists as well as the political class more broadly. This ambitious enterprise, launched at an important moment for the government, urgently demands to become the subject of a serious academic treatise. One
British politics has been frozen in a kind of reiterative cycle ever since Black Wednesday 1992: the Conservatives becalmed at 30 per cent in the polls, the Liberal Democrats making stealthy gains, New Labour dominant. Just six weeks ago there seemed some reason to believe that the Iraq war would bring some fluidity to this
It was an unusual preliminary to the war. No British prime minister before Tony Blair has set the scene for a military campaign with a visit to the Vatican for a blessing by the Pope. Admittedly it was not a state visit. Tony Blair’s trip to the Vatican was apparently in the capacity of the
Lenin remarked that there were decades in which history would stand still, and weeks when it would move forward by a decade. This is one of those terrible weeks when history is on the march. At this stage it is impossible to discern with any assurance the outcome of the war. But so much is
For some reason Britain is always sunny on the outbreak of war. London basked under a heat-wave in August 1914 as Asquith almost casually condemned Britain to four years of slaughter. It was the same in September 1939. This week has seen a succession of cloudless spring days. I suppose there is always the remote
All prime ministers need to be sustained by one necessary but reassuring myth: the illusion that they are in control. Some, exceptionally lucky, prime ministers are able to leave office with that illusion intact. But Tony Blair is close to the horrifying moment, which can be the psychological equivalent of a car crash, when that
TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr’s account is at any rate open to challenge. There was plenty about the future political editor of the BBC which a