Tony blair

Hunting may be banned, but the fight still goes on

Ten years ago today, Tony Blair’s ban on hunting with dogs came into force. Rural communities had marched, Otis Ferry had stormed the Commons, but none of it made any difference, and anti-hunt campaigners rejoiced when hunting became a banned sport. But though the law has been in place for a decade, the fight for hunting still goes on. Many hunts, especially those based in more urban areas, are still plagued by hunt saboteurs, as was demonstrated just last month when Mike Lane, a Master of the Tedworth Hunt in Wiltshire, was attacked so savagely by saboteurs wielding iron bars that he was knocked out. The Countryside Alliance are now calling for

If this is a debate about animal welfare, we must repeal the Hunting Act and start again

Today marks ten years of a ban on hunting a wild mammal with hounds in England and Wales, except under certain exemptions. To understand what a fundamentally bad law the Hunting Act is, and why it must be repealed, it is best to start at the beginning with the original purpose of the ban. For all the talk of animal welfare the long battle over hunting legislation was not predominantly about foxes or other mammal species it was about class, politics and a gratuitous misrepresentation of hunting and the people who do it. This is not my interpretation, but the reality as admitted by many of those who promoted the

Even the people who make political adverts aren’t sure they work

It is a common prejudice about modern politics that it is all focus groups and spin, all public relations and advertising. The rather heartening conclusion from Sam Delaney’s history of advertising in politics is that this is a calumny on the political trade. Delaney has spoken to everyone involved in political advertising since the phenomenon began in earnest with Wilson in 1964 and can hardly find a soul who is certain that advertising does anything more than varnish good ideas. Maurice Saatchi, for example, credited Margaret Thatcher’s proposals, rather than his talent for a pithy slogan, for her electoral victories. Chris Powell, a leading figure in Labour’s Shadow Communications Agency,

Labour finally starts to articulate its vision for British business

Why isn’t Ed Miliband at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference? Ed Balls tried to defend his boss this morning as he arrived at the event, saying it was ‘getting a bit trivial’ to ask who was attending which conference. The Shadow Chancellor said: ‘Ed Miliband has spoken at this conference a number of times… They’ve got me and Chuka Umunna and this has been tabled and agreed for months and months and months. We’re setting out Labour’s position. As I said it’s the position of me and Ed and Chuka and the whole of the Labour party. Ed has spoken at the conference many times before.’ To be

Brian Cox bans Ed Miliband from using 1997 Labour anthem

D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better was the song of choice in the Labour campaign that saw Tony Blair win the 1997 general election. Alas, Ed Miliband won’t be able to use the tune this time around. Professor Brian Cox, who played keyboard with the band, before becoming a TV scientist, says in an interview with the Evening Standard that he would not let Labour use the tune in this election. ‘I’d probably say no to Labour using the song — there are immense pros and cons to all the parties and I can’t quite see a clear direction. It’s very different now than in ’97. In ’97, it was obvious that everybody supported Blair. But

Blame Tony Blair for Labour’s new stupidity about wealth

Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay their taxes’. But there are a few more things which many Labour members would have put on the end: so long as you don’t earn it by advising Central Asian dictatorships, so long as you don’t hang around with Russian oligarchs, so long as you don’t make it from the Saudis. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson got filthy rich all right. But the whiff they gave off while doing so has only served to regenerate a very Old Labour disgust

A major-general names the guilty men

The author of this primer to the long-overdue Chilcot report, a retired sapper (Royal Engineers) major-general, nails his colours to the mast in the opening paragraph. The British High Command made a number of judgments with poor outcomes in the decade from 2000 to 2010 when fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan… The outcome in some eyes has been humiliation, accusation of defeat in Basra, an unexpected high level of conflict in Helmand and significant loss of life for our servicemen and women as well as local civilians — so far, without the compensation of it all being worthwhile. As a result: The UK’s military leadership has lost much of the

Delaying publication of the Chilcot report is the right thing to do

I don’t know about you but I tend to think Sir John Chilcot’s report into the Iraq war should not be published before it is finished. Actually, I do know about you and I know I hold to the minority view on this matter. So be it. Fashionable opinion is not on my side. Then again, fashionable opinion thinks Tony Blair is a war criminal so we may safely treat fashionable opinion with the contempt it has earned. It can go hang. Nevertheless, as Isabel says this new delay will feed a perception the report is crooked. That is, zoomers zoom and morons gonna moron and there’s nothing anyone else can do

Defiant Tony Blair apologises for collapse of Downey trial, but says On the Runs scheme was necessary

Meetings of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee are rarely so popular that they have to book an overspill room, but today’s hearing with Tony Blair was a sell-out occasion, with both the Wilson Room and the Boothroyd Room in Portcullis House packed with people wanting to watch the former Prime Minister give evidence on the On the Runs scheme. He was in a pretty defiant mood during the two hour-long session, but then so were the MPs, particularly Ian Paisley Jr, whose aggressive questioning ensured Blair was never truly at ease. Blair insisted repeatedly that the controversial ‘comfort letters’ were only issued to those who were not going to

Steerpike

The joke that stunted Alan Johnson’s career

To the Oldie literary lunch where Mr S dined alongside the magazine’s editor Alexander Chancellor and Alan Johnson. Talk soon turned to Johnson’s former boss Tony Blair, as the Labour politician recalled a joke that backfired spectacularly. ‘Probably the reason why I fell out,’ Johnson said, before stopping himself and tactically rephrasing. ‘Alex and I have been talking a lot about Tony Blair, who I tell a lot of stories about but they are all true and they’re said with affection.’ ‘But Tony didn’t like it when, do you remember when he had that heart problem and he had to go in to have an operation? Well, I was at the

Why Labour needs to step back from the hunting debate and look at the facts

The public can always tell an election is near when the photo opportunities start to increase. Just such an occasion occurred on the 10th anniversary of the Hunting Act in November, when the Parliamentary Labour Party office invited MPs to have a photograph taken, ‘with a large fox holding up a sign saying “Back the ban”.’ Needless to say, I did not attend. In his book Last Man Standing, Jack Straw says with regard to hunting: ‘To me, banning it was a nonsense issue for a serious party making a determined bid for government after 18 years in opposition. It was best left alone.’ Ten years after the Hunting Act

The missed New Year opportunities I would have rowed the Atlantic for

 Gstaad The very end of 2014 laid an egg, and an expensive one at that. I missed David Tang’s bash in London because I thought it too much to fly over for a cocktail party, but my restraint cost me quite a lot. It would have been worth rowing across to see Tony Blair schmoozing my old proprietor Lord Black. Two more wrong choices followed: I skipped Jemima Goldsmith’s party as well as her brother Ben’s wedding for a shindig of my own —one that turned out to be a bust. None of my gels turned up, but a lot of strangers did, and, to add insult to hurt feelings,

Hugo Rifkind

So the near collapse of A&Es around the country is all my fault?

Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear. This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of chumps such as me heading to such places for the sorts of

Tony Blair, master of communication, claims his warnings about Labour were ‘misinterpreted’

Politicians really are quite unfortunate people, aren’t they? Always being misinterpreted. It’s almost as though they speak another language (some Commons debates suggest they do, anyway) and journalists wilfully translate them wrongly. Today Tony Blair has claimed that his remarks about a lefty Labour party losing to a right-wing party have been ‘misinterpreted’. This is what he told the Economist: – There could be an election ‘in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’ and when asked if that means a Tory win, ‘Yes, that is what happens’. – ‘I am convinced the Labour Party succeeds best when it is in the

The new CEO of the Arts Council has been announced – Guardianistas won’t be happy

It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries. Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the LSO – ACE has burgeoned into a mighty quango that distributes £1.9 billion of public cash and £1.1 billion of lottery money over three years. It feeds not only the performing arts but museums, galleries, monuments, public libraries, poetry and pottery. It is a nanny state in miniature which, over the past generation, has become

GQ Editor reveals that Tony Blair was awarded gong for services to Wendi Deng

To Quaglino’s for the GQ Christmas lunch, where editor Dylan Jones was in a revelatory mood. Lifting the lid on his magazine’s controversial decision to award Tony Blair the Philanthropist of the Year gong at their Man of the Year awards this year, Jones recalled being quizzed about it in New York shortly after the September ceremony. Avid Murdoch watchers suggested to him that they GQ only dished out the gong due to Blair’s well-publicised (how to put it) friendship with Wendy Deng. Actually I think we did’, quipped Jones. The crowd – including Tinie Tempah, Rob Brydon, Tracey Emin and David Gandy — was described by one speaker as

Tony Blair reaches out to Gove

Tony Blair has taken some time out from posing awkwardly with his wife in order to pen a piece for the New York Times. While he tries to avoid getting drawn on talking about UK domestic politics explicitly, his feeling are poorly hidden: ‘…there have grown up powerful interest groups that can stand in the way of substantial and necessary reform. Anyone who has ever tried to reform an education system, for example, knows how tough and bitter a struggle it is. The bureaucracy fights change. The teachers’ unions fight change. The public gets whipped up to defeat change even when it is in the public’s own interest. The nearest

A beautiful speaking voice is a window to the soul

Recent text from a female friend. ‘I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ To which I reply, ‘But of course! Up there with the Dean of Westminster and Frank Gardner.’ The same day, walking in Kensington Gardens, another friend admits, ‘I think I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ We mourn the fact that MacGregor’s Wikipedia entry tells us he’s ‘listed in the Independent’s 2007 list of most influential gay people’, so the director of the British Museum is, sadly, out of reach to womankind. It’s his beautiful speaking voice that does the trick. I like the way, in his Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation, MacGregor pronounces ‘Germany’, with

William Hague’s stuck record

William Hague told the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards last week that he was standing down from the Commons ‘to do some other things I’ve always wanted to do’. So far that seems to consist of expensive after dinner speeches. Accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Savoy, the one time Tory leader finally revealed the secret to how he used to get the better of Tony Blair every week at PMQs. Hague recalled how Tony had two big folders ‘that went from Aardvark at top of the first folder, to Zoology at the bottom of the second, so he could find anything to show how terrible 18 years

Miliband triggers an outbreak of political unity – though not the sort Labour wants

Is the latest Labour leadership crisis actually triggering new wave of party unity? Lord Prescott, who has slammed Miliband as ‘timid’ for his ‘complacent’ leadership style, spotted John McTernan, Tony Blair’s former political secretary turned columnist, in the reception of the BBC after they had both been on the airwaves to discuss the party’s dire straits. ‘I remember when we used to disagree about things’ called out Prezza. And it’s not just sparring partners in his own party who Ed is bringing together. At last some common ground has been found between Ukip and the Tories. ‘He’s the best thing going for absolutely everyone right now,’ one Ukip spin doctor