Show 248 - John Rentoul
Matt Forde's Political Party
The Political Party
4.7 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2021
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you're not watching the new Labour documentary on the iPlayer, what is the matter with you? The new series has got everyone talking about the Blair and Brown era and one man who knows it inside out is John Rentoul. He wrote the definitive biography of Tony Blair and along with Jon Davies runs a course at King's College about new Labour. This is a great accompaniment to the BBC series, challenging some of the assumptions and narratives of the time, and some of the theories since. It's also highly relevant to the current situation Labour is in...
Follow John on Twitter: @JohnRentoul
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Political Party. Today's guest is John Renntall, biographer of |
| 0:14.8 | Tony Blair, writer of some fantastic books, politics and non-politics. And but also someone |
| 0:20.7 | who's been consulted for the new BBC series Blair and Brown, the new Labour Revolution. |
| 0:26.8 | If you haven't started watching it yet, what is the matter with you? It is brilliant |
| 0:31.4 | television and I'm not just saying that because obviously I have a deep interest in the |
| 0:35.4 | era and political TV. It is so well made and the interviews with Blair, with Brown, with |
| 0:42.6 | Manderson, with Campbell, with so many others are superb and it brings that era. It's really |
| 0:48.4 | well made. It's not just a nostalgia trip. It's really good analysis. Very at times. Emotionally |
| 0:57.2 | honest, it's the drama of it. It is great. So you have to watch that. So I've been meaning |
| 1:03.8 | to get John on for a long time. And I always had to get guests on around something vaguely |
| 1:10.4 | relevant if possible. Obviously in politics there's always relevant stuff happening, but |
| 1:14.4 | the moment I saw that, I thought now's my chance to get John Rental on because his |
| 1:18.1 | biography of Tony Blair, Tony Blair Prime Minister, is brilliant. I think I got it for my |
| 1:24.4 | 18th birthday party along with John Major's autobiography. Two great books which I really |
| 1:30.1 | enjoyed. But it's, what's great about his biography of Tony Blair is comprehensive. |
| 1:34.8 | It's a proper big read, but it's also an entertaining read. It's not a hardgoing, tedious |
| 1:41.4 | thing. It's magnificence is its quality in both its depth and its readability. So in a way, |
| 1:49.4 | it's almost like getting someone who's helped my book when I was a kid because I always loved that |
| 1:53.5 | book and I've followed John ever since. He does some more lighthearted output as well. But crucially, |
| 2:01.8 | he and his colleague John Davies run a course at King's College on the Blair years. So this is |
| 2:10.3 | someone who as well as being a biographer of Tony Blair is also an academic, is also teaching |
| 2:19.2 | that period in modern British history. In fact, John Davies and John Rental have a book, |
... |
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