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Hey everybody, it's Glenn Thrush with Politico's Off Message podcast. We're doing this thing on Wednesday, because I just got back from the UK. I was on a couple of panels at the Edinburgh Politics Festival, which was actually held in the Scottish Parliament. It was a lot of fun. Most of my time, I should tell you, was spent reassuring very nervous Scotsman and Scotswomen about

Donald Trump.

Everywhere I went where they found out what I did, people were coming up to me, pretty much

on bended knee, begging me to tell them that Donald Trump was never, ever going to be president.

I could not provide them with that reassurance, though back home in America, Trump was seemingly doing everything he could to ensure that result was actually going to happen.

So this was kind of a working vacation, but one of the things that I really wanted to do, and I wanted to do for a number of years, was to talk with Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Great Britain and someone who I always viewed as Bill Clinton's alter ego.

Blair and Clinton have gone in totally opposite directions.

Tony Blair's reputation is unbelievably bad.

I did a poll, an informal poll of cabbies in London.

I took about 12 cab rides, and each cabby I asked them what they thought of Tony Blair,

and eight of the cabbies said that they hated them.

And that seems to comport with what

his public relations standing is right now. And it's largely on the back of one thing, and that is

supporting George W. Bush all the way on the Iraq invasion. To some extent, Blair has fallen even

further than W on this. And he's particularly fallen because the Labor Party

that he represented as new labor during his tenure from 1997 to 2007, you know, it was all about

renouncing the far-left pro-union socialist underpinnings of the British Labor Party.

...