{"id":668343,"date":"2026-01-02T05:47:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T05:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/668343\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T05:47:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T05:47:16","slug":"tony-blairs-quiet-part-in-the-long-road-to-brexit-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/668343\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Blair\u2019s quiet part in the long road to Brexit"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201csecret meeting\u201d with Sir James Goldsmith, whose Referendum Party sowed the seeds from which Brexit ultimately grew. <\/p>\n

A senior Labour figure says that Blair plotted with Goldsmith years before the 1997 election because he wanted \u201cEurope to become a big source of division and a split in the Conservative vote\u201d. Well, Tony, not for the first time in your political career, we can utter a somewhat barbed \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

Tony Blair is alleged to have explored Europe as a political fault line in the 1990s<\/p>\n

NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS<\/p>\n

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 \u201crushed out in three weeks\u201d 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\u2019s next trial is due in March.<\/p>\n

For meta or verse?<\/p>\n

Nick Clegg\u2019s wife Miriam Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez<\/a> 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\u2019s new name. Clegg was moaning about CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s plan to rename the company as Metaverse when Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez said: \u201cWhat about Meta?\u201d She\u2019s yet to get any reward for this suggestion. \u201cShe\u2019s had no share of the wealth and she\u2019s very, very, very annoyed about it,\u201d Clegg said. Then again, as the company\u2019s share price halved in the year after the rebrand, she might not be due much of a payout.<\/p>\n

Palin stammering cut short<\/p>\n

While some stammerers found fault with Michael Palin\u2019s 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\u2019s stammer. The director, the Ealing legend Charles Crichton, was impressed but very quickly gave a note. \u201cMichael, that\u2019s very good!\u201d Crichton said after the first take. \u201cBut if you stammer as long as that the film is going to be three and a half hours long.\u201d In the end, brevity trumped authenticity.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Was Tony Blair the unwitting midwife of Brexit? New information suggests that the Labour leader went out of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-668343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115823931787161228","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}