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Coffee House Shots

Blair is back

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

Politics, Daily News, News

4.42.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s been 16 years since Tony Blair walked away from frontline politics, but rather than retiring to Fife to write his books – like another Labour leader – he has managed to build his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change into one of the most sophisticated and influential think tanks in modern politics. What role could he play under a Starmer government? 

Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and John McTernan, former political advisor to Tony Blair. 

Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

The spectator combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

0:06.1

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription in print and online

0:11.7

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0:15.4

Go to spectator.co.uk slash summer.

0:22.8

Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee Have Shots.

0:26.4

I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Joe McTernan for my political secretary for Tony Blair.

0:32.0

And we are talking about Tony Blair. Fraser, you recently wrote Tony Blair as back and offering

0:37.8

himself as a global consultant to the Starmer government. His company claims to have 100 staff

0:43.3

embedded in governments around the world. Will the UK be next? What's your answer?

0:48.6

Well, I think the UK very much will be next. We are seeing the return of Tony Blair.

0:53.2

It's an audacious return as well and people may have vaguely worked out that he was doing some

0:59.1

advising for sort of slightly shady Kazakhstan-y figures, you know, for a while,

1:04.0

but he didn't really show his face in Britain because he faced these awkward questions about the

1:07.8

Iraq War. So his portfolio was pretty much a foreign one, but now it seems to reach a threshold

1:14.0

of four two things have happened. Firstly, he has now morphed his previous speech making

1:19.2

business into Tony Blair Institute. Now, this TBI is a huge organization with, as it says,

1:27.4

people embedded, that's his word, embedded in governments over the world. If you go onto

1:32.3

his website, he'll tell you that they're not just in the back room either. They're in the

1:35.6

Prime Minister's office or in the President's office. So he is offering, offering through his

1:40.2

consultancy his basically governmental services to a whole bunch of countries. I'm right now from

1:47.9

Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Tony Blair Institute is a busy outfit. So far, he hasn't been

1:55.0

doing very much in Britain, but that's changed. We saw it changing during the pandemic, where he was

...

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