Word: blaire
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...months now, opinion polls have been predicting that Labour faces possible annihilation at the next election, due by spring 2010. The data pinpoints Brown as a liability. When he replaced Tony Blair, voters saw in the serious Scot a refreshing change from his predecessor's slick style. But Brown's deliberative approach has come to appear indecisive; his detail-heavy, poetry-free utterances have failed to connect with voters. He acknowledged these failings in his speech to the delegates. "I didn't come into politics to be a celebrity or to be popular," he said, adding, "Perhaps that's just...
...weeks is even longer, and the days before the conference served up events that could yet redraw Britain's political landscape. Brown was regarded as a skillful and successful Finance Minister in the Blair years, when he positioned Labour as a champion of free markets. In Manchester he took a new tack. "The continuing market turbulence shows why we need a new settlement for our times," he said, announcing proposals to "rebuild the world financial system." That's a massive ambition for a man struggling to control his own party, but the U.S. pollster Stan Greenberg, in Manchester...
...weeks prior to the shooting, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on three Tube trains and a bus. Two weeks later, on July 21, four more men outfitted with explosives failed to detonate themselves on London's transit system. An internal memo leaked on Sunday from Sir Ian Blair, chief of London's Metropolitan Police Service, seems to shift potential blame from the police force to the unprecedented security fears. "We confidently believed that our systems of command, of surveillance and of firearms intervention were among the best in the world," he wrote. "However, they failed in response...
...good writer, too. There's a sportswriter called Michael McCambridge who wrote a really great history of the NFL called America's Game. I'd never heard of him till recently. I like Seth Mnookin, who wrote Hard News, a history of the New York Times [during the Jayson Blair...
Cameron once described himself as "the heir to Blair." The comment, over dinner at the 2005 Tory party conference, horrified hard-line colleagues who suspected his brand of Conservatism concealed a dangerously liberal core. What he meant, says Cameron, is that "politicians have to understand what has come before." That includes recognizing strengths - and weaknesses. Cameron voted, with reluctance, for military action in Iraq and later sent constituents copies of a speech Blair made in support of the invasion. "The problem with Blair is that he was a liberal interventionist without a hand brake," says Cameron now. "There...