John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning. Click here and 'like' to receive updates on Facebook
I see that the Daily Mail journalist John Kampfner has repeated his claim that I called him a Saddamite in a radio discussion. I am, indeed, the “Mormon-style devotee” of Blair’s “tiny army of defenders” to whom he referred in The Independent this week. (Mormon Temple, Salt Lake City, right.)
What I said was that it was [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 5:40 pm
My Times subscription has gone belly up, so I’m grateful to Norman Geras for reprinting part of Chris Mullin’s review of Tony Blair’s Memoires (that is what it is called in France, right). This is the key paragraph for the haters:
Nor do I believe any of that “Blair is a Liar” nonsense in relation to [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 5:23 pm
Graham Stringer MP voted against military action in Iraq. So for whom is he voting in the Labour leadership election? He has a letter in The Independent today:
“Ed Miliband is glad he was against the invasion of Iraq from the start” and this is one of the reasons Johann Hari (3 September) is supporting him [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 5:10 pm
Well, that is more or less it. Ed Miliband’s campaign was built around a Guardian endorsement strategy and on Wednesday the newspaper failed to deliver, with a leading article of epic waffle true to the worst of the newspaper’s tradition, which failed to choose between the brothers.
David Miliband, meanwhile, has been endorsed by the Daily [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 2:00 pm
Roger Mortimore at Ipsos-MORI asks number 383 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No (I apologise for correcting his grammar).
This should keep the haters happy, but even I accept – even he accepted – that 13 years would have been enough, and that it would have been difficult for Tony Blair [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 11:15 am
Blair hate in perspective, from the Guardian report of last night’s The Late Late Show in Dublin:
Blair was greeted by about 50 protesters at the RTE studios – although they were easily outnumbered by the number of squealing teenagers who had gathered for another set of guests on the show – The X Factor twins Jedward.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 September 2010 at 10:22 am
They only do it to pay homage to some dead French poststructuralist, I know, but all one can do is marvel at the Daily Mail. Today it has a report (“The publishing world was plunged into chaos last night …”) about some of the stories in Tony Blair’s book that it thinks might be made [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 3 September 2010 at 10:32 pm
My first-dash review of A Journey for The Independent is here. And here is a comment from Martina Devlin, an Irish journalist who opposed the Iraq war, but who takes a sane and balanced view of Tony Blair’s overall record:
His decade as British prime minister coincided with a momentous period in Irish history, a unique [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 3 September 2010 at 8:41 am
Well, that went about as well as could be expected. The latest part of my quest for the source of Blair rage yielded plenty of hate but precious little illumination of its origins.
After writing about Blair rage on this blog (and previously here), I wrote an article for The Independent yesterday predicting that the publication of Tony Blair’s [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 2 September 2010 at 10:16 pm
Well, you can read it for yourself – it is particularly good value as an e-book from Amazon for £6.99 – but so far the wall of hate has been pretty much as expected here and in my article for The Independent this morning (I should never read the comments).
The main interest at first glance [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 1 September 2010 at 10:59 am
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