Excellent investigative journalism by Tom McTague and Unherd. I didn’t hear anything that surprised me but it’s important to put some substance behind the widespread suspicions about Tony Blair and his institute (and Ellison’s philanthropy, and the Clinton Foundation, and Soros, and the Gates Foundation, and…yeah, it’s a long list).
Sort of a redundant comment really, but I’m always stunned by the hubris and self-regard by Blair and his like. Somehow they think it’s their appointed role to set the fate of mankind.

“He flies on private jets and is escorted in armed cars with security always close by.” This is regular behaviour for crime bosses.

What a good article. How on earth has he managed to schmooze so many leaders with his track record of ruining the UK? It shows how insecure they must feel.
This loathesome individual is bent on tagging and labelling everyone on planet earth and succeeds in making this woman determined to keep off every database that it’s humanly possible to do so. If it means I’m unable to travel then so be it.

As for global health initiatives, if they spent less on trying to vaccinate everyone (which iatrogenic harms probably cause much of the illness in the world) and more on supplying clean water and basic sanitation then they might conceivably be of some use to mankind.

They are Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopaths with a Jesus Complex.

It’s tragic really. He really thinks he can rescue his legacy by doing what he did to destroy it in the first place.

I should be astonished that the Bungler of Baghdad, who invaded Iraq without a post victory plan leading to rise of IS etc can be taken seriously as an implementor of policy. It is disturbing that I am actually not suprprised. Money and connections are much more influential than ability.

Great job team. Britain’s WEF, bought to you from the man who hopes to succeed Schwab. The rising kleptocracy is one to watch over the next 10 years. Geopolitical hehemonic tensions, sovereign debt crisis, generative AI applications, ageing demographcs, and soi-disant climate change, mean major changes lie ahead. These organisations are, indeed, poising themselves for a reset.

Committed UK to War against Iraq without a mandate on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction. b*****d! His massive wealth isolates him from the consequences of his disastrous worldview.

I thank the author for updating me on what Mr Blair has been up to. I actually voted for him back in the 90s, as many did, believing he would rid us of what the ‘evil, greedy Tories’ were doing at the time. I used to like his energy and zeal, and what for a while appeared to be a gift for plain speaking.
 But then came the lies and deception of 9/11 and the Iraq War; his anti-democratic meddling in Brexit; and most recently, his garish labelling of those Britons who chose not to take the Covid jab, as “idiots”.
 Given what has been unfolding from this sinister health debacle, his advice and opinion must now be considered dangerous, ill-informed, and possibly even suspect.
I feel the sooner he withdraws from advising the British government, the better. People with his views cannot be trusted.

I voted for the b*****d 3 Times. Mea Maxima Culpa.

For my sins I used to work on immigration for a small campaigning body, ‘helped’ by a ‘partnering’ org funded by Blair and Soros.

A lot of the job was keeping them out of our meetings . . . on our issues.

Because it emerged that they didn’t have any issue of their own, well none so much as a permanent need for attention.

He’s shallow. I don’t subscribe to the idea of him as some nefarious Great Reset agent, he’s just superficial.
Look at everything he did while PM; fatuous and damaging Constitutional changes, screwing up further education, clueless on the economy to the point he delegated that to Brown and headed off to International Politics as fast as he could.
He’d be deeply at home in a large Corporation redirecting it from the messy business of beating competitors and serving customers and focussing on ESG.
I’ll give him one thing, he’s quite possibly the Worlds leading schmoozer.

Such is the life of Blair in “retirement”. Aged 70, he works with the zeal of a man with something still to prove

His innocence?

something perhaps to redeem.

His immortal soul.

The new face of global socialism!

Treacherous betrayer of Britain, ruination of the nation, now he brings his destruction to the world. It would be better if we had imprisoned him as would have been just.

Global change? To what? Stability in the Middle East? A home for the refugees to return to? An end to the Ukraine confrontation? Rebuilding Ukraine? Curtailing eastern fossil fuel use, if it is in fact even necessary?
Blair still has blood on his hands and no obvious philanthropy to wash it away. His influence is yet to trickle down to 23 Acacia Avenue; or Karachi.
His ilk, the Clintons, Obamas, Trudeaus, Bidens, Arderns, the Oz Labor Party, Scholz, Macron, Rutte must be a severe disappointment to him. They’ll be ousted soon. Leaving him where? The UK Labour Party and their two dimensional mannequin leader?

Having read this excellent article one can only appreciate even more why Brexit happened? The sheer conceit of Blair to airbrush the Iraq invasion, David Kelly’s suicide(or murder?) for revealed the WMD lies, the secret plan for mass migration from the EU, the 2008 UK Banking Crash and the immoral home confinements and vaccine mandates out of his past is incredible.
November 1997 Tony Blair “”I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am,”
Sadly, so many are still taken in by the fakery!

As a student in the 1990s I was extremely disappointed in Blair. I was never really into politics, but back then many of us believed that Labour being voted in would reverse the trend of growing inequality in Britain. Blair radically transformed Labour from a working class party to a middle-class party. After a few months it was very clear he was more concerned with how he came across and joining the ranks of the rich than actually doing anything useful for the working poor.

Really great article – thank you. Full of very interesting information – and even a reference to Goodbye, Lenin…a favourite of mine since I saw it in the cinema in Munich back in 2003.
The bits which particularly leapt out at me were the paragraphs about Blair’s tendency towards going for things he has faith in. I read “My Journey” while on holiday in 2012 and I do recall becoming quite uncomfortable about how closely Blair’s religious faith was tangled up in big political decisions such as Iraq.
While political decisions are never purely rational and have elements of emotion, power-play, moral values and ethics all bound up in them – I think it was the way Blair was so up front about his (religious) faith that made me start seriously questioning his leadership.
Reading this, it appears that this Blairite “faith” isn’t just of a religious bent, but extends to ideas or technological development. This enthusiasm comes across as being a bit childlike in nature. He has a sort of “faith in faith”.
And that’s all lovely for him on a personal level, but when faith comes into contact with big politics, it means that big decisions are being made on the back of something quite intangible, non-transparent and inexplicable…which, unsurprisingly, fails to inspire “faith” in the people who have seen where Blair’s decisions got us previously.
I’m sure that other leaders are guided by their faith too, but the trick is to keep quiet about it. Blair seems to think that he’s some kind of messiah and that talk of faith is a part of the role he has been sent to play.

He should be in prison.
My conscious is clear, I never voted for him.

Getting to grips with democracy one private jet at a time.

I admit, to my eternal shame, that in 1997 I voted for this charlatan.

‘But how much of this is actually real? “Do governments really want his strategic advice,” one person who knows Blair put it to me, “or his phone number?”’

So, the obvious question is – what benefit does Tony actually offer? Why do all these VIPs meet him, and give him money?

Just read an op ed in the Spectator World about Barack Obama’s third term as shadow government in the Biden White House. How these people live in a completely different world but yet exert such influence on ours is truly terrifying.

Power without responsibility…

Pretty good investigation, more like this please!

In a nutshell, he still thinks he’s the messiah.

Their Terrifying Plan written by Vernon Coleman. Sums what is happening in the world by powerful rich people determined to change how we hoi polloi will live in the future.

Bush offered him a place at the top table – money, unaccountable power,etc – for backing him on Iraq. That he was fully prepared to lie to parliament, the country – even himself perhaps? –
shows why no one should trust such a messianic maniac. His hubris and hunger caused hundreds and thousands of deaths.

I can see how Blair and his technocrats might be considered an answer to populism, but in another sense he seems rather like a populist: someone riding his “fatalism” regarding globalization and technology, rather than pining away for values of individualism and the natural. In short, an opportunist. As an American, I recall how attractive Blair seemed to many of us that supported Clinton–a liar, but our liar–when Clinton’s bad boy behavior proved so vulgar so quickly. This fine article helps this American realize that saviors with ID cards are everywhere to be feared.

An excellent article, well researched and very sinister. Blair has used exactly the same methods as the WEF to expand his influence, placing people at the heart of the governments and administrations where he wants to exert it.
“and even forming an alliance where necessary to defeat their existential enemy: the “populists” who must never be appeased. I was told Blair was firmly in the latter camp”
The irony of this is that Blair himself was the first truly populist leader in modern times after a certain Austrian gentleman in the 1930s, and using many of the same methods like controlling the media via the Murdoch press and, of course, the BBC.
Talking of “methods”, a true anecdote from 1996. Years ago I was very friendly with a woman whose husband ran one of the PR companies that New Labour used. The central Blair cabal would hold meetings at her home, well away from prying ears and eyes. She herself was a life-long Labour supporter. Gradually she started drinking and eventually became an alcoholic. She told me that she heard things at those meetings that frightened the life out of her – literally – she said that if she ever repeated them her life would be in danger. Even in her most drunken moments she never revealed anything to me, just bursting into tears if I tried to probe. Her marriage did not last and I lost touch with her many years ago due largely to her alcoholism – she would phone me at all hours of the night babbling on incoherently – so I do not know what happened to her. She was a highly intelligent woman, and I wouldn’t have said a weak one either, but her life was ruined by what she learned from that association.

Don’t you just know that not a cent of the vast sums of money that the TBI sucks in is paid by anyone from their own pocket: it’s all other peoples’ money.

“I am a sprinter,” Ellison once remarked. “I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.”

Jesus wept….

Thanks for an enthralling article which made my head spin as I tried to connect all the dots, organisations, governments and people. I kept being reminded of Tom Lehrer’s classic lines:

“Evr’y evening you will find him
Around our neighbourhood
It’s The Old Dope Peddler
Doing well by doing good”.

Tony has been doing well by doing good, at least in his own eyes. I loved his pal Larry Ellison’s island project combining a luxury resort with agricultural research.

Practically all the consultancy work in Africa looks like the dictionary definition of “white saviour” initiatives, helping the benighted natives to achieve what they are too stupid or ignorant or corrupt to achieve unaided. Any independent evaluation of all this consultancy money and effort? I guess you would need another bunch of eye poppingly expensive White Saviours to judge what the first lot achieved.

To be fair to Tony, at least he is not lecturing us on climate change while globetrotting on his private jets. And all those armoured cars must burn more gas than your average family hatchback.

Having done some accountancy training, I know that there’s more to financial reports than boring arithmetic can describe. But Larry alone apparently “committed” 83.2 million bucks to the TBI in 2021 when its turnover was 81 million. As Tony’s fellow lawyer pal Bill Clinton would probably say, it all depends what you mean by “committed” and “83” and “turnover”……

Reads like a plot for a scary movie.

Sounds like Meghan Markle with a much larger staff.

The Wagner Group of the extreme centre.

Great work by Tom as always.
What I find interesting is the maximisation of the trend that politicians move away from being drivers of change to merely implements of change.

In a previous age it was not uncommon to see those who wanted to effect change go and get elected. I was genuinely humbled to hear from (now retired) MPs about their sense of duty to help generate positive change.

But first in the US and inevitably in the UK, it has proven much cheaper and more efficient to remain in the private sector and outsource an agenda via funding private offices & think tanks. Tom’s article outlines how the TBI is worthy of a Harvard Business School case study on just such a transition.

Excellent piece. Conveys Blair’s narcissism (“to him the world is an endless parade with himself taking the salute”) and his hatred of politics and political choice. In government, he made many speeches suggesting that there was an optimal, expert policy on everything (his) to which no reasonable, patriotic person could resist, Fascist is too easy a term of abuse, but such a belief really was characteristic of historic capital F Fascism. Blair never takes responsibility for the costs of his “expert” policies when they fail, or the populist revolts against them and against expert elites in general. Instead he doubles down on promoting more expert elitism. Blair’s “expert” speech in 2014 deserves more attention – the one AFTER Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine when he promoted co-operation with him against militant Islam. Why do people go on listening to his self-centred, simpering sanctimony – let alone paying for it?

“At age 70, he works with the zeal of a man” …in the grip of a Faustian bargain.

Hardly surprising, UnHerd has obviously ‘caved in’ to external pressure, and in recent weeks the CENSORSHIP has been awful.

Frankly I’m surprised it hadn’t happened earlier.

Let us look to the root of this kind of social phenomenon.
The total failure of representative political organisation is reflected here. Calling the system representative democracy would be a misnomer.
Western societies have devolved into various shades of oligarchies in he course latter centuries.
And this process took place, sadly, under the collective eyes of the common people who failed to jealously guard their freedom and sovereignty.

Ahh, so now we know why the Party in power are not Conservatives.

“The truth is that Blair is only just emerging from a period of his life when public animosity meant that he rarely ventured out in London and, indeed, felt more comfortable not just out of the city but out of the country itself. Looking back, it is astonishing how quickly his reputation fell after leaving office.”

It would give anyone with an ounce of self-reflection some pause for thought, or at least it should. To understand Blair, one needs to watch “The Ghost (Writer)” starring Euan McGregor, Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan.

It seemed to me that becoming PM was never more than a stepping stone for Blair and yet his personal hubris did for him in the end. I used to think that he sees himself as our ‘president’, more than a PM and freer to express his opinions than our head of state. When opinion of him and his reputation suffered in the UK, he simply upgraded his ambition and began to see himself as president of the world, with wisdom and guidance to share on anything and everything. The emperor’s new clothes meets the madness of ‘king’ Blair.

“The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ambiguous soup of human motivation; in the flawed, frail characters of ordinary human beings with conflicting aspirations, trying to do good in the world and for themselves.”

Excellent. It was worth reading for this gem alone. It is a far more accurate description of why people try to do good, rather than the usual, cynical, catch-all description of ‘virtue-signalling.’

More than anything, this sounds like the pathology that CS Lewis describes in his essay “The Inner Ring”, but lived out on a global scale.

It will come back. There’s just an army of trolls here lately. When comments get a lot of flags they get removed, but they always return after 12-24 hours.