Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you for tuning in.

And for the second time in a week, if it's okay with all of you, we are going to forensically analyze a piece of writing, which has caused waves. We did it earlier in the week, for those of you who have joined the

podcast for the first time or missed the one earlier in the week, please go back and listen,

where I looked at a piece written about Andy Burnham that got the Westminster lobby extremely

excited. It concluded with, I think, a flawed argument that Andy

Bernard would not be a good prime minister. So that got everyone, you know, the Westminster

consensus group thing, very excited. And anyway, I look through it because it always concerns

me when a group think at Westminster amongst the media forms, when assumptions

become fashionable, because it leads then to a kind of lazy perception of what is happening

in politics, what makes leaders and potential leaders, which is always more interesting and

complex.

And you can probably guess, would you know if you've seen the title of this podcast,

that I'm going to look now at Tony Blair's essay, which erupted on Tuesday night,

Wednesday morning when he gave a series of interviews in relation to the 5,000-plus word essay.

And again, you know, lots of the lobby tweeting.

This is got to read every word of this, what analysis and all the rest of it.

It's so interesting when this happens because you need to step back and look very carefully, because Blair has a brilliant way of writing with apparent, clear-sighted clarity. But when you look a bit closer,

it's not as clear-sighted as it seems by any means and raises many, many questions that he

appears to kind of answer but doesn't really, really. It's been a constant pattern in his entire

career beginning long ago, you can look it up if you Google it. He wrote a letter to Michael

Foot, where Michael Foote was

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