Have you an opinion of Tony Blair's book 'A Journey '.

[modeller]

I have just read TBs book which I found interesting . It is 700 pages long and therefore difficult to summerise. To choose a few points though , he considers Old Labour ( BB before Blair and the 3 years AB after Blair ) to be as bad as the Tory's claimed. He admired much of Maggy Thatchers legislation as necessary and these new super sized unions as a threat to our economy. He still believes he was right about Irak and certainly make a good case.
He comes across as a do-gooder and I felt out of touch with the negative side of human nature.
He couldn't accept that so many of the MPs were in it for the money and some were crooks.
He believes that most MPs are too joung with no experience of the real world but that his seven years as a barrister did . He is probably doing a good job in the world trying to bring opposing sides together but he doesn't seem to understand extremists.
It was a good read though and an insight into many of his decisions.

[woofgang]

yup, my opinion is that I don't want to read it!!

[rov1200]

Blair is likely to be recalled to the Chilcot Inquiry because of his stated inconsistences in the book and what he said at the inquiry. In the book he says he suffers on a daily basis the people that have been killed in the war.

I believe this was different from what he said at the inquiry.

[ludwig]

I think the fact there's only three answers to this question including this one sums up what people think about it. I'm sure it'll be a big seller though.

[ichkeria]

I have just read this book several months after buying it.

It is an interesting, even fascinating read, although it suffers slightly from an over-familiar and at times almost careless prose-style. And there are the inevitable mistakes: I am sure that the Unionist ex-MP Ken Maginnis did not appreciate having his name spelled the same way as the Sinn Fein deputy first minister!
For me the over-riding points are:
On "Old Labour" versus "New Labour" - TB was concerned that Old Labour was unelectable as anything other than on a one-term protest vote and he was desperate to make it the natural party of government, previously the Tories' dubious conceit.
He is plainly sceptical, contemptuous even, of left wing politicians whose policies appear not in tune with an "aspiring" electorate". He is unconvincing, however, on what to do for the "unaspring" electorate.
It is good to see him standing up for the British MPs who were tarred unfairly en masse as corrupt by the expenses scandal.
It is plain that on foreign intervention, as he says, early spectacular successes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone encouraged the belief that similar policies would work elsewhere. For me, he is less than wholly convincing on the reasons for going to war in iraq, but I respect his reasons for doing so. But I did anyway, before the book. He also makes the important point that there were two conflicts in Iraq: the war to remove Saddam and the terrorist campaign led by iran and Al-Qaeda.
His criticisms of the press are wholly justified and ought to spark the debate he hopes for, but won't.
The best summary of this book I have seen is by Peter Stothard, who calls it the work of an extraordinary individual who in the end failed to convince the British people that he was an "ordinary bloke". But yet throughout the book one is struck by his awareness of the need to perform for the cameras. If the bo

[ichkeria]

If the book has one great merit, it is to demonstrate to the honest reader, who is willing to listen, that there was, despite what many claimed, enormous substance beneath the so-called "spin" and surface polish.