Tag Archives: jonathan powell

Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?

By Mark Pack | Fri 29th October 2010 - 12:55 pm

The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would get most people the sack but didn’t stop Gordon Brown getting the Premiership:

During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of

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Posted in News | Also tagged ed balls, ed miliband, gordon brown, labour party, nicholas watt and tony blair | Leave a comment

Opinion: New Labour, New Machiavelli?

By David Rundle | Sat 23rd October 2010 - 4:55 pm

What has already become the best-known anecdote in Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli is a snippet of conversation he had with his then master, Tony Blair. Powell asked him how he could put up with having a three-hour conversation with Gordon Brown, to which Blair responded by asking him whether he had ever been in love. ‘“Not with a man”, I replied’ — and we know he was lying. This book is testimony to his devotion to Blair.

It is, for sure, a curious billet doux -– less like a bunch of roses than a handful of thorns. Comparing, however …