Blair

One (kind!!) friend gave me Tony Blair's 'A Journey' for Christmas. I'm reading it - I'd never have bought it. It's a book which is both engrossing and offputting at the same time. There is an awful lot of repetitious waffle in it, but it has the authentic tone of the man, and one can't help feeling he's really put pen to paper, however much it probably is ghost-written. It is, of course, massively self-justifying but also occasionally (disarmingly) honest(-sounding).

I find myself asking, have I misjudged this man? I honestly had got to the point where I couldn't bear the sight or sound of him. I feel, even just looking at the photo on the cover, he must have a screw loose to allow such a disconcertingly unnatural image to appear on his autobiography. He is worrying, when you do know something about the subject, for example what he says about the railways post-Hatfield as being in effect too risk-verse for his assessment of the political situation (not a direct quote - my summary) makes the blood run cold.

But he is effective, and passionate, and rational, about his own great cause - modernisation; he is engaging about his mistakes (e.g. the move to ban foxhunting); he is analytical and probing about issues he encounters, e.g. the relationship between Islam and Christianity prior to 9/11. That's as far as I've got.

A mystery wrapped in an enigma?