Blair (right) and Obama (left)

I have been invited to comment on anonymous gossip. Kevin Maguire says in the New Statesman:

The rightward trajectory of Tony Blair, multimillionaire, has led him to an American la-la land inhabited by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Fox News. Word reaches your correspondent of an encounter between Blair and a prominent lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch. My informant recounted the one-time premier denouncing the current US president as dangerously left-wing. “The problem with Barack Obama,” opined Blair, “is he’s really a socialist.” The problem with Tony Blair, muttered my snout, is that he was never a socialist.

Stripped of the local colour, Maguire is reporting that Blair thinks Obama too left wing or, in American taxonomy, too liberal. Maguire is a brilliant journalist, with whom I agree more than is good for either of us, but here he is merely repeating what Blair himself says, albeit less colourfully, in A Journey. There, Blair hints at a preference for John McCain over Obama in the 2008 election, and implies (p673) that Obama is soft on extremist political Islam:

The implicit message [of President Obama's speech in Cairo in June 2009] was: We have been disrespectful and arrogant; we will now be, if not humble, deeply respectful. But join us, if you will.

The trouble is: respectful of what, exactly? Respectful of the religion of Islam, President Obama would say, and that is obviously right; but that should not mean respectful of much of the underlying narrative which many within Islam articulate in its politics today …

It is the narrative that has to be assailed. It has to be avowed, acknowledged; then taken on, inside and outside Islam. It should not be respected. It should be confronted, disagreed with, argued against.

Blair might have called Obama “a socialist” as a joke, but his sense is clear.

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• http://twitter.com/Broxted Ciaran Rehill

  Blair’s stance on “radical” Islam is redolent of those Japs that fought on 30 years after Hiroshima. Blinking Tony emerges into the jungle clearing, the world having moved on.

• petra_etc

  Blair is right on Islam.

• tykejim

  Meanwhile, The Independent today says (P4): ‘Sir Christopher Mayer …..suggested a deal was “signed in blood that night (in Crawford).’ “. I thought you had some influence with the paper? If so, I expect to see a correction of this inaccuracy!

• http://twitter.com/JohnRentoul John Rentoul

  My influence is sadly limited, but actually I think it is correct to say that Sir Red Socks did “suggest” that a deal was signed in blood. He said he didn’t know to what extent such a deal was done, but that is suggesting it. The whole conspiracist obsession about this (“what did Blair promise?”) is, as you know, the real distraction. Blair could have promised the moon on a plate, but he needed the support of the Cabinet and the votes in the House of Commons to deliver it. It was not a secret in April 2002 or at any other time that Blair thought the credible threat of military action against Saddam Hussein was justified.

• porkfright

  Blair is right on jack all.

• porkfright

  Pray tell us how you know for sure that this is an inaccuracy?

• tykejim

  Mr R – you are being too accommodating IMO! Meyer said (as you know): “Crawford was a meeting at the president’s ranch. I took no part in any of the discussions …..So I’m not entirely clear to this day … what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas ranch.” So he says he wasn’t there, and that he doesn’t know. Funny sort of suggestion.

• porkfright

  Blair right and Obama left? No-as the great American composer Charles Ives wrote-$ame, $ame,$ame.