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Not smart not casual and no reverse gear indeed

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Not smart, not casual, and no reverse gear indeed.Strongly suspecting that Mr Blair was always that poodle of clich?s one thing. Knowing that he actively determined to insert himself in the presidential rectum (and that he sought to circumvent the embassy when he felt that it wasn't far up enough) is quite another, and for this confirmation we owe Sir Christopher much thanks.His talent for comic observation and understated wit is a great bonus, albeit, as I say, he has some way to go to match Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. So does the image of Mr Blair rushing out of dinner just as Bush was about to toast his dear friend and ally, and back to his guesthouse to change when he realised he was the only one present wearing jeans. As for the symbolism of Mr Blair being prepared to sacrifice his testicles in the cause of ingratiating himself with the President, that too speaks for itself. I was later told that his wardrobe for the weekend had been the result of intensive debate within No 10 If true, it was not wholly successful Bush looked pretty relaxed.

By contrast, Blair looked uncomfortable, his efforts to appear similarly insouciant undermined by the inability to get his hands fully into pockets that appeared glued to the groin."The thought that, as the war for the future of Western democracy approached, the PM and his advisers were obsessing about his cords says enough about the priority imbalance between substance and style. Sir Christopher relates how, one weekend at Camp David, Mr Blair "put on a pair of ball-crushingly tight, dark-blue corduroys. Here we see the power of the shopping-list theory of history - the notion that the greatest insight sometimes comes from the most trivial minutiae The case of the wrong trousers comes to mind. Geoff Hoon quivers with nerves in the presence of Donald Rumsfeld; and also tongue- tied and intimidated when dealing with the Americans, and slow to master a brief, was that ?-nebbish Jack Straw.Amusingly out of their league as these bit-part players appear, it is, of course, Mr Blair who commands centre stage, and the most revealing vignettes are also the most banal. In his wry and literate way, Meyer fleshes out the bones of what's been a pretty familiar skeleton ...

a star struck giant ham of a PM with infinitely more interest in feeding his gargantuan ego than anything else, great at florid rhetoric but without the discipline to master detail, surrounded by some of the most spineless and spiteful apparatchiks, elected and unelected, that even British politics has yet produced.He shows us John Prescott attempting to engage a Senator in debate about the situation in Kovosa, and the Balklands in general, as poorly briefed as he was aphasic. At worst, it is a betrayal of etiquette, but one most will happily forgive in the grander scheme of things.No, with Sir Christopher they are absolutely stuffed. But given the warmth with which he writes of Mrs Thatcher, and his time at Peterhouse under the tutelage of the recently deceased Maurice Cowling, that high camp granddaddy of Thatcherism, this won't wash. They cannot even accuse him of greed, since the current boss of the Press Complaints Commission has given the £250,000 paid in serialisation rights to children's charities.If the best they can do is charge him with disloyalty and breach of confidence, yet an administration with such a record of briefing against its own, in which Alastair Campbell was permitted to keep a daily diary ("my pension"), is hardly on strong ground there.

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