Was Tony Blair the unwitting midwife of Brexit? New information suggests that the Labour leader went out of his way to help the growth of Euroscepticism in the 1990s. The diary has been told that when Blair was leader of the opposition he had a “secret meeting” with Sir James Goldsmith, whose Referendum Party sowed the seeds from which Brexit ultimately grew.
A senior Labour figure says that Blair plotted with Goldsmith years before the 1997 election because he wanted “Europe to become a big source of division and a split in the Conservative vote”. Well, Tony, not for the first time in your political career, we can utter a somewhat barbed “Mission Accomplished”.
Tony Blair is alleged to have explored Europe as a political fault line in the 1990s
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The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is now a bestseller after his prison memoir sold 140,000 copies in ten days. We are told the book was “rushed out in three weeks” which, as he served 20 days of a five-year sentence, is also true of the author. No doubt his publisher will be hoping for a sequel. Luckily for them, Sarkozy’s next trial is due in March.
For meta or verse?
Nick Clegg’s wife Miriam González Durántez was not delighted when her husband took a job with Facebook, but she did have a lasting impact on the company. The former Lib Dem leader has revealed to the comedian Matt Forde that it was his wife who came up with the company’s new name. Clegg was moaning about CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to rename the company as Metaverse when González Durántez said: “What about Meta?” She’s yet to get any reward for this suggestion. “She’s had no share of the wealth and she’s very, very, very annoyed about it,” Clegg said. Then again, as the company’s share price halved in the year after the rebrand, she might not be due much of a payout.
Palin stammering cut short
While some stammerers found fault with Michael Palin’s portrayal of the condition in A Fish Called Wanda, the comic believes that, if anything, his original portrayal was a little too accurate. Palin tells the Radio Oldie podcast that, on the first day of shooting, he gave a performance based on his own father’s stammer. The director, the Ealing legend Charles Crichton, was impressed but very quickly gave a note. “Michael, that’s very good!” Crichton said after the first take. “But if you stammer as long as that the film is going to be three and a half hours long.” In the end, brevity trumped authenticity.
It is 2026 and, contrary to the expectations of our forebears, we still live in a world of beef. That we would all become vegetarians is but one of the predictions for this year that newspapers reported 100 years ago and which have now been collated by the researcher Paul Fairie. Some are accurate, such as marriage being a contract easily cancelled, there being so many cars on the road that they cannot move and that students would be partial to food made from soya beans. Others, however, are still a way off. For instance, the retirement age is not yet 100 and America has not yet replaced politicians with lifetime appointees. Then again, on both fronts, we might need to see how things look in 2029.