Finally, in 1995, John beacame the lead writer and political correspondent for The Independent. Likewise, he also wrote a biography of Tony Blair. Moreover, John was accused as one of the most high-profile defenders of Tony. Rentoul is active on Twitter. Twitter Facebook Start here. About; An interview I did on Normblog. October 15, 2014 3:58 pm / Leave a comment. This was number 373 in Norman Geras’s series of profiles on his wonderful blog, 19 November 2010. The normblog profile 373: John Rentoul. John Rentoul is a Blairite. He was born in India in 1958, where his father was a minister of. John Rentoul on Twitter: Tory voters have more in common with Labour on the economy than with Tory MPs & party members: great new research from @philipjcowley. John Rentoul on Twitter: 'Ten years ago today the skies darkened, and the country has been grey and miserable ever since. Tony Blair stood down as PM 27 June 2007'.
John Rentoul, or @JohnRentoul, chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday, sums up how he uses Twitter and the impact he believes it has had on political reporting in the UK (managing to avoid the hyperbole of many other love notes to Twitter from journalists):
Most of the time, however, Twitter is like a news service. It is different from social networks in that links are not necessarily mutual. People can choose to follow each other, but the Korean research found that four-fifths of links were one-way. This means that hub Twitterers with a lot of followers act as diffusers of news. When I started on this newspaper as a political reporter in 1995, the main source of UK “breaking news” was the Press Association wire – short bulletins of news, as it happened. Now Twitter fills that gap, as journalists and citizen-reporters let each other know when someone has left their microphone on, or has ruled out standing for the Labour leadership. When Adam Boulton started to lose his temper with Alastair Campbell on live television during the post-election negotiations, people tweeted to tell others to put Sky News on – to catch the best bits. William Hague announced that the talks with the Liberal Democrats were back on on Twitter. It is a way for politicians to speak to – or beyond – the conventional media. But it also offers journalists other ways of reporting.
4th December, 2015
How did Labour’s most successful leader become so hated?
Hostility towards Tony Blair is like the nuclear reactor fuelling the Jeremy Corbyn insurgency. It is almost as if the so-called left has no independent life of its own. It sustains itself and is driven onwards only by the equal and opposite force of its hatred for the Labour Party’s most successful prime minister.
John McDonnell was at it yesterday on the Today programme, saying Hilary Benn’s remarkable speech reminded him of Blair’s speech before the vote on the Iraq war in 2003. In the new, kinder politics, that is the worst thing you can say about someone. “The greatest oratory can lead us to the greatest mistakes” he added, just in case the bulls had missed the red rag.
I have tried to understand Blair rage many times since 1994 when I first encountered it. I was berated by a teacher for agreeing with the new Labour leader that exam results should be published, allowing people to compile league tables. For a long time it was a minority pastime, but after Iraq it became widespread.
Sometimes I thought I had made sense of it, while thinking it was mistaken, but increasingly the furnace blazed with what looked to me like unreasoning fury and I wondered if there were deeper psychological explanations.
Just as I thought the last election would allow the reactor to cool down, it started to heat up instead, drawing its energy from the same sources, fiercer and more concentrated than before. Despite the defeat of the Blairites in 2007 and again in 2010, it seemed that the main point of the 2015 leadership election was to defeat the Blairites again – this time with the most heated antagonism so far.
John Rentoul Twitter Login
So what is this about? It has little to do with the historical reality of the 1997-2007 government. A reasonable view of Blair is that he was, on balance, a good prime minister. If the British people generally had their doubts about his record it would be that he allowed too much immigration, but that is not the cause of Blair rage.
Those of us who want to see a Labour government again need to understand the causes of Corbynism. Iraq is a big part of it, more for its symbolism for a party that has always had a neutralist-pacifist wing than for what actually happened. The intelligence failure on Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons curdled into a myth of deception that still makes it hard for the party’s internationalist wing to argue its case, as Benn found on Wednesday.
The hostility towards Blair goes wider than that of course, taking in the unshakeable conviction that Britain has groaned under the unjust yoke of capitalism and inequality ever since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and that Blair was the continuation of her evils by other means. Against such religious belief, mere facts are powerless.
These beliefs are held by a small minority of the population, but, concentrated at the same moment into the Labour Party by historical accident, there are too many of them. Among Labour’s members and registered and affiliated supporters, 251,000 voted for Corbyn. Since he was elected, 78,000 people have joined the party – although some of them will be registered £3 supporters converting to full membership. So Corbyn’s power base must be more than 300,000, and I am told that Labour’s membership is still rising, as new recruits are coming in faster than centrists leave in despair.
It will take a long time to persuade so many people to compromise or give up, which is why talk of a coup against Corbyn is pointless for the moment. It may be years before the blaze of Blair rage subsides. When the time does eventually arrive, it will need better-chosen ground than military intervention abroad. Corbyn needs to be shown to be mistaken on economic policy, public services and people’s security.
By John Rentoul
The Independent on Sunday
John Rentoul Twitter News
Please note: articles and posts on ‘Middle Vision’ reflect the views of the individual authors and not of all involved in ‘Middle Vision’