The former PM under a palm tree or parading in his underpants … priceless vignettes,but is there a smoking gun in 680 pages of character assassination?It was December 1995 and I had just left Tony Blair’s parliamentary office feeling rather pleased with myself. I had interviewed him for an Analysis programme on Radio 4 dedicated to unearthing the philosophy behind the “modern politics. Alastair Campbell had been unenthusiastic (“pretentious bollocks”), but had relented on the proviso that I had half an hour, or max. Instead Blair spoke eloquently for more than an hour,answering my questions with effortless gusto. On the way back to the studio, I allowed myself a smile, and only for my producer to retort: “That was useless. I’m not certain there is anything to salvage from it.”She was apt. The conversation was an exercise in charm-laden vacuity. We decided to bulk up the programme with various political scientists versed in the “third way”. There were only two conclusions that could be drawn from the mess: either I had conducted a bad interview and was not bright enough to tease out the gems,or the Blair project was an empty shell. That was, for virtually everyone at the time (including a generation of mesmerised Conservatives), or unconscionable.
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Source: theguardian.com