I bet the the Blairs spend a lot of time in the confessional box.
I thought one of their kids looked more Scottish than the others.
Tony Blair
Comment of The Day
You go for weeks, nothing but the usual daily outrage, then bam bam bam, it all happens at once and typically I’m forced away fropm the keyboard. It’s a bloody conspiracy I tell you.
The pustulent boil of real estate development corruption ripening beneath this latest fraudulent funding scandal, and about to erupt as a result of the fraud’s exposure, iwill show the public a New Labour venality that’s way beyond any parody Armando Ianucci could come up with.
A commenter at the BBC’s Have Your Say pretty much sums up New Labour and why it is that they are so corrupt:
This is typical of the Labour party, most of them like their leader are C list lawyers(the most dishonest profession there is) or creepy little civil servants from murky Labour town halls who don’t have any principles at all or they wouldn’t get to be M.P’s in the first place. All of those involved in perpetrating what is in fact fraud should go to jail for a spell of reality training.
L Telfer, Scottish Borders
Writing as a former C-list lawyer myself and as a former pre-Blair Labour Party member, I can say with some confidence that’s an absolutely accurate description of New Labour politicians. Cunning, small-minded, petty, not as clever as they think they are, their ambition and and greed so outstrips their competence to function at the level to which they aspire that it’s a miracle they’ve survived in power as long as they have without being found out.
The North east has always been a problem area for Labour politicians when it comes to real estate, party funding and personal ambition. Remember T. Dan Smith? Abrahams’ donations show that the, shall we say, interplay between the Labour party and big money developers in the northeast still carries on in the traditional way, decades later.
Mr Abrahams, a single man who has homes in north London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in the north-east where his father, Bennie, was a prominent figure in Labour circles.
“A larger than life character with a name that could open doors,” said one former colleague of Bennie Abrahams, who joined the council in the late 1950s and decades later became the city’s Lord Mayor.
Mr Abrahams’s mother, Marion, was also a Labour councillor and some who know him suggest that her son has spent his whole life trying unsuccessfully to emerge from his father’s shadow.
His first venture into Labour politics came in the 1970s, when he represented an inner-city Newcastle ward on the now-defunct Tyne and Wear Metropolitan County Council.
“It was the safest Labour seat on the council. Or at least it was, until he managed to lose it four years later,” said a former party colleague.
Undeterred, byIn [sic] 1991 Mr Abrahams had set his sights on representing Labour in Parliament. He arrived for the selection meeting, a former member of the constituency Labour party recalls, for the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond accompanied by a “a blonde-haired lady and a young boy” who were introduced as his wife and son. Mr Abrahams, who claimed to be 41, duly won the nomination. and personally approved a press release which stated that he lived with his wife and son in Newcastle.
All was fine and dandy until a woman called Anthea Bailey approached a regional newspaper to reveal that she and her 11-year-old son had posed as Mr Abrahams’s family “to boost his image” in the selection contest. The former marketing executive explained that she had met him when she was unemployed and looking for somewhere to live.
It’s at times like this I bitterly bemoan that Private Eye hasn’t put it’s archive online: through it you can follow forty years worth of local authority and regional corruption in the northeast (and elsewhere, to be fair) – it’s a region that’s always been a stronghold of Labour MP’s, not least the former PM Tony Blair and his deputy John Prescott. the story above is typical of those featured. There’s probably more there for a reporter who likes to dig. I await developments with interest.
But in the meantime what the hell are we to do for a competent, functioning government? Even if there were to be a vote of no confidence and a snap election tomorrow, the alternatives to the current gang of fools and blustering incompetents is to vote in some more, different incompetents.
Christ, what a bloody mess.
Once A Whore…
Guess who wrote this in Forum magazine before he was famous?
‘a little known aphrodisiac – the dangling pipes of Scotland…It’s all tongues and teeth, lips and gentle squeezes..As I lie on a Lisbon hotel bed next to a Portuguese person crying out for more, I thank my pipes for doing most of the chatting up.’ So nothing autobiographical going on there, except in my dreams. I do so love a slut’
… and said this to The Sun twenty-odd years ago?
On the subject of being a gigolo, Alastair apparently appeared in a 1980 article in The Sun (so it must be true) headlined ‘WANTED, Men For Hire’, in which he said, “you would talk, have dinner, make love; in return they would give you money or gifts…It’s never hard work but the women do expect a high standard of performance.
Yup, it’s the Pepys de nos jours, Alistair Campbell. And he called Carole Caplin a flake and a liability…
Comedy Double: So, Farewell, Then…
What else could today’s comedy double be, but a selection of Tony Blair’s YouTube greatest hits?
Blair was the first boomer PM we’ve had but what he really wanted to be… was a rock star:
Blair has been defined by the people around him as much as anything, there’s Cherie the scouse scrounger for a start, with her own unfortunate taste in friends:
Oh Cherie.
And it seems some of her friends are really, really unfortunate – dodginess personified in fact, like Alan B’stard (NSFW):
Then there’s that “frenemy” thing he’s had got going on with Gordon Brown. Little Britain sums up the roiling depths of green-eyed envy behind Gordon’s Easter Islandesque visage:
What about John Prescott, AKA Prezza, AKA 2 Shags, AKA the Deputy PM? He was with Blair every step of the way, making no sense whatsoever:
But then, then there was that fateful day and that fateful meeting and the tragic, doomed relationship that followed. It was shock and awe, a folie a deux, a coup de foudre, many coups de lots of foudre in fact – but it could’ve been so, so beautiful:
Many wondered what it was they talked about when they were together in private. Now you know – here’s some fly-on-the-wall video from the short-lived comedy series Doubletake:
But why, oh why, oh why did he invade Iraq? Was it just for love? John Culshaw explains on behalf of the PM at a special edition of PMQ’s:
By now it was all going horribly wrong and the press were asking even more awkward questions. Bush & Blair were forced hold a joint press conference on Iraq, courtesy of Dead Ringers:
Georgies’ advice to Tone? Tell ’em “It wasn’t me”. Why not? Worked for him.
That didn’t work though and by then the electorate was getting restless and wanted him gone. Or so you’d’ve thought – but bugger me if he didn’t go and win another election. How very odd!
Electorally victorious Blair may have been, but Iraq’s was still a clusterfuck and then there was the sleaze and the cash for honours scandal at home, and by this the public was not best pleased:
Pressure from the media , pressure from the electorate, pressure from El Gordo – should he stay or should he go?
Reports said he was descending into madness and was seeing ghosts:
But he kept telling us things could only get better. Via Don’t Watch That, Watch This:
But it wasn’t getting better, oh no. Time Trumpet documents the depths to which Blair’s popularity had sunk:
Finally, finally – he resigns. according to Armando Ianucci a bottle of amaretto is mysteriously involved:
His resignation speech was a doozy. Or at least this resignation speech is:
At last, he’s gone and here’s a final goodbye, from Bloggerheads:
and a response to Cherie’s parting comments to the media at the door of No. 10 – “We won’t miss you”:
But we can’t let Mr. Tony Blair go until we’ve said thankyou. So thankyou, thankyou, thankyou Tony Blair – you’re still super!
Bonus clips:
Now we have a new PM. Hello, I’m Frank Zappa Gordon Brown!
But will Brown be a safe pair of hands? Bremner Bird & Fortune put the new PM in a reasonably-priced car to try and find out:
What will satire be like under Brown? The ‘Gordon Is A Moron” vids have already started:
Not to mention the ‘Golden Brown” filks:
Not sure the satirists have quite got the measure of the man yet. But fear not! The Beloved leader has not died, he’s just been transmogrified:
So if the Gordon Brown thing doesn’t work out, we can have a Timelord as PM. Sorted. Fantastic.
