The Green Box

Those pigeonholing Abbas have overlooked a number of facts. Over the past decade he has displayed the kind of political courage Israelis can only dream of their own leaders showing. As early as the first dark days of the second intifada, Abbas was the only Palestinian leader saying openly that the violence must stop.

A Labour Party unable to deal with Blair's legacy, and to claim the credit – as well as learn the lessons – will inhabit the same political Groundhog Day as the Tories did while shivering in Thatcher's shadow. Particularly, as the Blair decade of economic growth, rising employment and investment in public services may soon look like a golden age to voters.

I thought the Blair autobiography would be a careful and crafty attempt to rewrite history in the former Prime Minister’s favour. I thought the figure depicted at its centre would bestride the globe like a colossus. But, almost stream-of-consciousness, in a book written as though it were a taped conversation with a ghost writer where the ghost has then decided to type up and send to the printing press verbatim, Mr Blair paints a curiously frank picture of who he was, how he saw things and how it felt. Funny, shallow, engaging, big-headed, sloppy, rambling, affable, canny, jejune, confessional, lazy, good-natured, self-righteous, philosophically confused, delusional, sometimes repellent, often lovable and never entirely trustworthy, Mr Blair emerges almost as a caricature of the politician we thought we saw: still crazy after all these years. The only thing he insists on with any complete conviction is that he always meant for the best. And in that, by the end, the reader will believe him.

Alistair Darling admitted on Wednesday that Britain’s controversial supertax on bankers’ bonuses had failed to change the industry’s behaviour over pay as “imaginative” financiers devised ways to avoid it.

Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, has surprised many with its candour. The book was written off by some in advance of its publication on Tuesday as likely to be self-serving or bland. It is inevitably the former – no politician would embark on such an exercise if they did not want to paint themselves in a favourable light – but it is not bland, and is more revealing than many of its kind. We learn how he would drink a gin or whisky before his evening meal, and up to half a bottle of wine during it, and of his worries about his alcohol intake. He tells of his “anguish” at the loss of life in Kosovo and Iraq. His premiership was a time of colossal strain on a man who was battling to bring up four young children as he engaged in one of the most controversial and unpopular wars in British history, all the time confronting the daily risk of a terrorist assault on British soil. Mr Blair is a man of extraordinary courage and one feels that courage and humanity on the pages of this book. But is he also a man of judgment and execution?

POLITICAL memoirs are notoriously dull. too often they are just exercises in vanity or historical duty, revealing little about the the innermost thoughts of their authors. Nigel lawson’s vast doorstop of an autobiography, for instance, touched on almost nothing outside the arid details of his work as Mrs thatcher’s chancellor in the 1980s, while the book by clement attlee, the post-war labour Prime Minister, could have hardly been more devoid of colour. “This is not so much the picture of a life as a greatly expanded entry in Who’s Who,” wrote one critic.

Tony Blair is Labour's great election winner. No Labour leader will win three successive victories by such wide margins again. In the memoir there should be a model for his successors to follow, at least a hint of a route back to power. There is one, but it is for another party. There is nothing I have read that could not have been written by David Cameron, George Osborne or Michael Gove, a self-confessed Blairite. As I wrote on Tuesday in the context of Labour's leadership contest, Cameron has worked out how to deal with Blair's version of New Labour. He supports it.

Academies succeed because heads are given the freedom to shape their curriculum; they are at liberty to insist on tougher discipline, pay staff more, extend school hours, and develop a personal approach to every pupil. The Brown government, convinced that politicians and bureaucrats should micro-manage schools, curtailed such freedoms. This Government trusts teachers to control the classroom and trusts parents to choose schools.

TONY Blair's book is excellent for David Cameron and the Coalition. The ex-Labour PM says the new Government is right to make cutting public spending its top target. Mr Blair lays bare his venomous feud with Gordon Brown, who he says always blocked reform. But aren't there questions for Mr Blair? He backs the Cameron-Clegg shake-up of public services - reforms he wanted Labour to tackle. So why, with his landslide victories, didn't he do it?

David Miliband appealed to Tony Blair not to issue a public declaration of support in his battle to become the next Labour leader, fearing it could damage rather than boost his prospects in the contest, The Independent can reveal.