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Tony Blair made much of my 20s and 30s miserable. When I should have been partying into the early hours I was indeed partying into the early hours — but it was Conservative partying, and to no avail. Blair was the greatest Tory-killer of all time and dominated politics when I was working for William Hague and then for Iain Duncan Smith. In theory I should be an ideal customer for a book that portrays him as a greedy good-for-nothing but Blair Incan investigation into his affairs since he left office ingrinds too many axes to be persuasive. Subscription Notification. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information. The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your subscription. Your subscription will end shortly. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your access to the most informative and considered journalism Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask the UK. Accessibility Links Skip to content. Menu Close. Log in Subscribe. Blair inc. Tim Montgomerie. Monday March 23 Tony Blair: the former Labour leader clearly has questions to answer about some of the shady world leaders he has Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask with. Blair Inc: The man behind the mask - News and events, University of York

Attention: For textbook, access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. Arrives in Business Days. Close search. Blair Inc. Vendor John Blake. Quantity must be 1 or more. Condition Used New. Add to cart. Take a closer look at the world of Tony Blair, whose private financial dealings within a complex web of business relationships he tries to keep hidden from the public eye Since leaving office inthe secretive empire of Tony Blair has grown exponentially. As a businessman he has been unprecedentedly successful for Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask former public servant, with a large property portfolio and an estimated 80 million of earnings accrued in just a few short years. But how has he managed to achieve this? Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask an ex-Prime Minister comes with certain advantages, and besides his excellent state pension and hour security team, Blair enjoys the best contacts that money can buyas do those willing to pay him for access to Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask. Consequently, Tony Blair Associates clients can be found around the world, and include the morally distasteful presidents of Kazakhstan and Burma. There is also Blairs role as special envoy in the Middle East. While his record as a peacemaker is in doubt, the position has brought him into contact with a variety of oil-rich potentates in the region who now number among his most profitable clients. From the complex financial structures he uses to hide his profitsand the amount of tax he paysto the multiple conflicts of interest produced by his increasing web of relationships, this book attempts to expose the dubious private dealings of this very public figure. Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask by Francis Beckett

They had to find someone who would play the game, and Tony Blair accepted the role. A man stood at the corner where Downing Street meets Whitehall — the nearest the public can get Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask No. Around him were a large number of protestors against the Iraq War. As far as anyone knows, there was no one there to support the outgoing PM. But if Tony Blair noticed the stark contrast between his last day as Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask Minister and the day, ten years earlier, when he had entered the building in triumph, he gave no sign of it. In Parliament at midday he gave his standard non-apology for Iraq, saying of Britain's soldiers, 'I am truly sorry for the dangers they face in Afghanistan Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask Iraq. I know some people think they face these dangers in vain. I don't and I never will. There was something for MPs to congratulate him on. That day he was stepping down not just as Prime Minister, but also — unusually for a retiring PM — as Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, and he announced that he had accepted an invitation to become Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. Its website spells out Blair's mission:. Tony Blair is charged with implementing a development agenda in line with the Quartet's mandate: promoting economic growth and job creation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and supporting the institution-building agenda of the Palestinian Authority PA. The goal is to produce transformative economic change on the ground, underpinning the top-down political process. In the House of Commons, the Rev. Ian Paisley said, 'He has entered upon another enormous task. I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated, and that at the end of the day he'll be able to look back and say: it was well worth while. As we write, seven years later, Tony Blair, with his magnificent Jerusalem offices, his armour-plated car, his Jerusalem staff, would be a fantasist indeed if he were looking back with the satisfaction that Ian Paisley hoped for. Peace in the Middle East looks further away than ever, and the Quartet envoy seems entirely irrelevant to what is going on in the region. Could he have made a difference? Could a different Quartet envoy have made a difference? It's hard to say. It's hard even to say what success might look like. All you can ask is that the envoy should put his heart and soul into it. Did Blair do that? Blair's appointment was not straightforward. The Bush administration in Washington drove the appointment. According to a well-placed Washington source, the State Department opposed the appointment, but Bush insisted, saying, 'Blair sacrificed his political career for me. The new British government under Gordon Brown may have been privately pleased that Blair might be spending a lot of time abroad, but EU leaders were lukewarm and the Russians positively hostile — they endorsed the appointment unwillingly. The Israeli government welcomed the appointment and the Palestinian Authority was not consulted. As the Quartet Representative QRBlair has to ensure that the group's mandate and primary aim is met. The position is unpaid. He says he spends about a week a month in the region, but all of our sources — including diplomats and Middle East correspondents of British newspapers, who monitor his activities as closely as he will allow — tell us that this is an overgenerous estimate. The French journalist Jean Quatremer, Brussels correspondent for Liberation, talks of Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask 'rare appearances' in the Middle East, and the appearance of being more interested in making money. His presence is not intrusive. It does not feel like a week a month. He certainly doesn't report to me once a month. Blair's office does not give any indication of how much time he spends in the region, but told us that journalists would not be aware of all his visits, so their estimates would, we were told, not be reliable. However, the office declined to offer its own estimate. There is no doubt that his predecessor in the job, James Wolfensohn — for whom Ashrawi had much more respect — spent much more time in the region than Blair does. Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, did the job for a year, from Aprilafter being appointed by the four partners. Wolfensohn told us that, to do any good for the peace process, you have to put a lot of time into the work. To a degree it is a full-time job and you cannot do that on a timetable of two or three days. You cannot do anything in a rushed manner in the Arab world. Wolfensohn worked on the job of QR almost full time. By contrast, Alex Brummer, city editor of the Daily Mail, who ghostwrote Wolfensohn's autobiography, said on his newspaper's website that 'far from being embroiled in his mission of deepening economic and security ties between Israel, the PA and other parties, [Blair's] feet rarely touch the ground in Jerusalem'. According to Brummer, 'Blair's approach to the job has been a stark contrast to that of his predecessor as Quartet negotiator the former World Bank president James Wolfensohn Brummer says that Wolfensohn addressed issues such as the removal of rubble left by Israeli bulldozers when, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, they destroyed the settlements inside Gaza, and organised openings at the road crossings between Israel and Gaza so there could be free movement of buses for the Arab population and goods between the West Bank and Gaza. What the Wolfensohn experience demonstrated is that the quartet's work was not about great geopolitical thinking or the Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask on terror, familiar territory for Blair's high-flown rhetoric, but about detailed on the ground negotiations. There is nothing exciting about bus routes, Gaza border openings and security barriers in the West Bank. But this is what being the Quartet negotiator was meant to be about. It is a job to which Blair, with his once over lightly, butterfly approach to diplomacy was entirely unsuited. That has not bothered the former Prime Minister. The Quartet sinecure may pay him no money directly but has been a godsend for his broader ambition of making as much money for Blair Inc. So while the Middle East has lived through some of its most traumatic and bloodiest modern episodes — the aftermath of the second Israel—Lebanon war of and Israel's Gaza campaigns of and — Blair was hardly to be seen. Instead of continuing with the effort to bring Israel and Palestine together, through economic and security cooperation, on the former PM's watch the situation worsened dramatically Blair seemed to think that occasionally turning up at the region's most exotic hotel — the mosaic-clustered British-owned American Colony in Arab East Jerusalem — and consulting with his negotiating team and a few local leaders and journalists was sufficient. Is all this a little over the top? Brummer, after all, is known to have a low opinion of Blair, as does the newspaper he writes for. It's worth examining how much of this is confirmed elsewhere, and what Wolfensohn himself thinks; and we were able to get this from Wolfensohn himself. Wolfensohn resigned partly because the work was so hard and unrelenting and was damaging his health, but also because he was frustrated at the lack of progress, because he thought his mandate was inadequate, and because he felt he did not have the support from the Bush administration that he should have had. Alvaro de Soto, former UN envoy to the Quartet, says Wolfensohn was lured with Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask proposed job description that would have given him a writ 'essentially covering the entire peace process'. But his final terms of reference were much narrower and were quickly whittled down further still, according Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask de Soto. James Wolfensohn arrived full of enthusiasm in May It was a turbulent time, but a time of hope. Israel was disengaging from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, which was a step in Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask right direction; but, in January the next year, Hamas won the Palestinian elections, and Israel refused to talk to the organisation. All the building blocks were in place for the conflict that erupted in He donated money of his own to help the Palestinians buy Israeli-owned greenhouses in Gaza. He 'devoted his considerable clout to bringing about some semblance of co-ordination between Israel and the Palestinians so as Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask ensure a smooth disengagement,' according to de Soto. But it soon started to go wrong, and Wolfensohn lasted in the job only eleven months, resigning when it became clear that he had no room for manoeuvre and no power to change anything. He was a prisoner of the US and Israeli governments. He might have had a minimal role in partially relieving the worst effects of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinians, and he might have been able to take small steps towards reviving the Palestinian economy through high-level fundraising, but none of that was going to make a real difference. De Soto noted that Wolfensohn tried hard and often to get his mandate broadened, but 'this was resisted perhaps most strongly by the US State Department, which had proposed his appointment in the first place'. To make a real difference, Wolfensohn was clear that he needed a different mandate. He says that his attempts to expand his mandate quickly made him enemies in the State Department, most notably with the neoconservative official Elliott Abrams, as well as with Israeli leaders. He told Ha'Aretz, 'The basic problem was that I didn't have the authority. The Quartet had the authority, and within the Quartet it was the Americans who had the authority I would doubt that in the eyes of Elliott Abrams and the State Department team, I was ever anything but a nuisance. Eventually, according to de Soto, Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask painstakingly cobbled together an Agreement on Movement and Access which, Wolfensohn and de Soto agreed, was wrecked by State Department interference. And that, for Wolfensohn, signalled that the end was near. Sure he could not Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask much without a better mandate, he was ready to go. De Soto wrote, 'An attempt by Secretary General Annan late in to revive his mission met with Russian support but was received with little enthusiasm in Washington and shunned by Wolfensohn himself. Wolfensohn had played a useful role, nonetheless. He had helped the Gaza disengagement to go as smoothly as it could go. He also, says de Soto, 'helped to carve out arrangements concerning the fate of Israeli infrastructure left behind by the [Gaza] settlers'. He made a 'clever deal to buy, then transfer to the Palestinians, most of their lucrative greenhouses. But Gaza remained what de Soto called 'an open-air prison controlled directly by Israel on all Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask, including the sea which is tightly patrolled by the Israeli navy, and indirectly the border with Egypt. His successor, Ehud Olmert, refused to negotiate with the Palestinians while Hamas was part of the government, and the Quartet Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask this decision. De Soto was one of many diplomats who Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask that finally and irrevocably shutting the door on talks with Hamas was the short way to endless war. He pleaded for a flexible approach that would not set impossible demands on the Palestinians as a precondition of negotiations, but others in the Quartet — principally the Americans, but also the EU — refused. The Ha'Aretz interview took place after Wolfensohn's resignation and shortly before Blair was due to take up his appointment, and Wolfensohn did not sound as though he hoped for much from the Blair mission: 'My worry for Tony Blair is that if you read the mandate he has — it's exactly the same as mine. Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask talks about helping both sides, helping the Palestinians, but there's nothing there about negotiating peace. He was in no doubt about the size of the problem facing Blair. So I think it's going to require, on the part of Tony Blair or someone, some real negotiations to try and get this started. Blair's mandate, like Wolfensohn's, confined him to promoting improved conditions for Palestinians by boosting their economy, as well as security coordination with Israel, humanitarian issues and institution-building. In practice he has mostly concerned himself with economic issues, and with trying to get investment into Palestine. His work was supposed to Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask violence on both sides, but the Quartet's concern under Blair has been almost exclusively confined to Palestinian violence. Officially at least, the goal is Palestinian statehood as envisioned in the document known as the Road Map. Wolfensohn told us that the mandate that Blair has as QR is identical to his own, and confirmed that this weak mandate was one of the Blair Inc.: The Man Behind the Mask reasons why he resigned. He says that Blair tried to get an expanded mandate, but it was not allowed.