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Thoughts on it to those who have read it?

Only read the first couple of chapters so far, liking it so far....

Same as that James. He's actually pretty funny.

what is it? by whom?

I had to google it as well. It is Tony Blair's book that has been much hyped.

ok, didn't realise the title.

It's meant to be really awful, and even includes fictional scenes from films as reality  :dontask:

I picked up a hitch-hiker. Is that the same?

Interesting book. I'm no fan but he was the PM for 10 year, gotta read the book just coz.

The thing that tilts me the most was how much he would complain about the media. A rant on how the press were stopping him solve the ills of the world would find its way into pretty much every chapter.

It also reads like he believed himself to be the only person who made Britain tick. His accounts of various national emergencys and events would have you think that without him the island would have sunk into the sea.

The war stuff is interesting. A sentence I like was something along the lines of

I've given mucho thought as to whether I might have wrong. I ask you to give some thought as to whether I might have been right.

He didn't say mucho, but that was the jist.

Yer man Blair is basically an interventionist who likes to occasionally lay the big time smackdown with ground troops on yer Slobodan Milosovich and Saddam Husseins in order to discourage other people indulging in genocide and what have you.

Whether this works, and the question as to whether or not it should be Britain getting it's hands dirty with this sort of thing are debatable points. Blair is pretty set in his ways and doesn't try to hide his views that you've got to knock a head every now and then to keep folk in line. I appreciated the consistency of this position, though I'm undecided as to it's merits.

One good point he made eloquently was that he seems to get blamed for the blood of all those who died in Iraq, and Al Qaeda et al who encouraged the Shi'ite/Sunni sectarian violence and the insurgency don't get blamed for any of it. It's all Tony's fault.

Also an interesting perspective on the whole second UN resolution thing. He thinks that there was a case for needing one legally and a case for not needing one, depending on which lawyer you talked to, it was a bit of a wash.
The political mistake was that in trying to get the second resolution and failing, the perception of peeps would be that you did defo need it and they've decided that the war was therefore defo illegal, even tho they've really no clue as to international law or it's interpretation.

The Brown/Blair stuff gets nasty. Too much info but you can't look away. He's not a big Ed Balls fan lol

I've just read through his change from being the more junior minister in the Brown/Blair years to party leader and there is, without a doubt, a massive ego there - justified or not. But isn't that somewhat expected and isn't it the ex PM's view we want? By and large, from his point of view, isn't it him making the country tick? I've read few other politican's books and to be honest they're pretty shit. This is shaping up quite nicely.

If it was all modesty and kid gloves I'd be disappointed.