Who framed Tony Blair?
Brussels – Despite pleas to focus on policies rather than names, much of the talk among European Union leaders in Brussels this week was about whether Tony Blair should become their first ever president. Britain’s charismatic former premier had entered the race as a frontrunner. But his decision to back George W Bush’s controversial war in Iraq while he was in office, and his failure to win over friends among fellow left-wing leaders, ultimately proved fatal. “We have a common position concerning Mr Blair: we don’t consider him a member of the socialist family,” is how Ramon Jauregui, a socialist politician from Spain put it Thursday. It could be argued that the absence from the summit of one of his most powerful allies, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was recovering from scarlet fever in Italy, did not help. But there are more profound reasons for believing that the future president of the European Council will not be a global star from Edinburgh. According to Piotr Kacz