Hints and tips:
...Burn after Reid-ing One of the more enduring Whitehall reorganisations was Tony Blair and John Reid’s reduction in the size of the Home Office in March 2007....
...John McTernan was political secretary to Tony Blair in Number 10, also director of comms for the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and just told me that he was also thinker in residence to the South...
...Blair is more interested in the policies than the vehicle. “I think he’d be just as happy if Rishi Sunak ran with his ideas,” says one close ally....
...According to Lord Jon Mendelsohn, a fundraiser in Tony Blair’s government, “The £19mn cap at the last election is what you’d spend on a junior Congress seat in the US.”...
...One question I’d be interested to hear John’s views is whether Rishi Sunak will be more concerned about the switch of voters to the Labour party or more concerned about the switch of voters to Reform in...
...Inexperience was much in the UK news last week after Dame Sharon White, boss of the troubled John Lewis retail group, said she would step down after five years in the job....
...And, you know, ditto in some ways Theresa May talking about ending modern slavery; you know, Tony Blair talking about public service reform....
...Brunswick chair and co-founder Sir Alan Parker also drew attention to Timms’s supremely connected “inner crew”: Goldman Sachs chief operating officer John Waldron; Centerview Partners founder Blair Effron...
...For most of his military career, Jackson writes, his record was “respectable but unremarkable”, never rising above the rank of colonel....
...A lot of big achievements build on what went before, whether it is Blair in Northern Ireland building on what John Major did, or Gove in education building on what Blair did....
...They’d been in charge for 13 years. Things got worse rather than better....
...In 2002, shortly after the death at the age of 81 of John Rawls, the columnist Will Hutton wrote an article chastising the then New Labour government of Tony Blair for misusing the work of the American political...
...In 1997 and the Blair victory, John Major lost 4.5mn votes between 1992 and 1997. The Labour party only gained two million votes. Most of the votes that the Tories lost simply stayed away....
...(Do read John Reed’s excellent column on that.) Yet from Downing Street’s own communication, you’d think this was a routine visit of the kind that Major or Brown might have done....
...I’d give it back....
...I think it’s the point being made by John McTernan, one of Blair’s former advisers; that he’s a kind of a unique figure in his rabble rousing, sort of fiery invective and so on....
...“I’d cross a bridge at night, and walk across the steel works . . . It always seemed to be rather gloomy and raining, and I’d think ‘God this is beautiful’”....
...There’s no sense of love for Keir Starmer, no sense of excitement about him, as perhaps there was when Tony Blair was leader of the opposition....
...Late last year, I asked Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the German parliamentary foreign affairs committee and a former colonel, about the threat from Russian agents....
...In today’s newsletter: Centerview’s courtroom showdown Kering tries on Valentino for size The Wall Street rift putting banker pay on the stand Blair Effron likes to say that discussions over banker pay...
...The biggest of these, according to John Carroll, the head of international and transactional banking at Santander Bank, would ultimately be the data generated by digitisation which, he told a panel I was...
...So you’d think they would stand any chance of getting that demographic back or starting to rebuild support. They’d have to do more in the Spring Budget....
...You know, the comparison that’s almost made is to 1997 when Tony Blair had his landslide victory against John Major....
...“Blair surveyed the world around him and delivered the change he could....
...What happened in 1997, that historic Blair win that Sir John Curtice said might even be exceeded in the coming general election, was that a lot of Tory voters stayed at home....
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