Ephems will shortly be intermittently AFK* for a variety of reasons so please don’t expect any blog posts or responses to comments for a while.
Meanwhile we sit and shiver in sub-zero London and wonder whether our daughter in snow-bound New York is going to make it onto her flight to Heathrow. Global warming? Pah, humbug. [...]
Does Tony Blair realise that in a couple of sentences in a religious affairs interview with one Fern Britton on television, he has blown what’s left of his defence on the Iraq war out of the water?
‘”If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. [...]
27 October 2009: Me to Guardian Letters: submitted for publication
Sir,
I enjoyed George Monbiot’s proposals for Tony Blair’s future (Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair, October 27), but was sorry that Monbiot joined the many commentators who erroneously describe Blair as the “Middle East peace envoy”. According [...]
Some more random reflections prompted by events of the past week or so:
The commentators’ consensus on Gordon Brown’s apparently successful teasing of David Cameron at PMQs on Wednesday about his and other Cameroons’ Eton educations (“[Tory] inheritance tax policy seems to have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”) is that Labour has [...]
Two weeks ago, the UK press ran a sensational story about a patient, diagnosed by medical specialists as having been for years in persistent vegetative state (PVS) with no consciousness or ability to communicate, discovered through a state-of-the-art scanning system to have been fully conscious throughout, and now enabled to communicate through a specially designed [...]
Barely a week into the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq, two ex-mandarins’ evidence has pretty definitively acquitted Tony Blair of one of the gravest charges against him, and convicted him of another.
In the testimony by Sir David Manning, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser during the key period preceding the attack on Iraq in March 2003 [...]
