THE TELEGRAPH: Boris Johnson wagers – a fiver – that the former PM will not be granted his dream of ruling 500m people.
A spectre is haunting Europe, my friends. That spectre has a famously toothy grin and an eye of glistering sincerity and an almost diabolical gift of political self-reinvention. Barely two years after he stood down as prime minister, it seems that Tony Blair is about to thrust himself back into our lives. It turns out that he is not content merely to be in charge of brokering peace in the Middle East – which you would have thought was a full-time job for anyone. It isn't enough to potter around the world making speeches about climate change and Africa. He wants more, much more, than to consecrate his remaining days to the promotion of inter-faith dialogue and school sport.
With his colossal mortgages in Buckinghamshire and London's Connaught Square, you might have thought he needed to stick firmly on the after-dinner circuit. You might have thought that the Blair finances oblige him to keep making boss-eyed speeches to armies of tuxedoed Arizona neo-cons about the importance of the special relationship and beating up Saddam Hussein. Well, not any more, it seems. Blair has evidently piled up such a fortune that he is ready for one more big public job, and we now discover that his extinction as prime minister was only the prelude for his re-emergence – like some wizard in The Lord of the Rings – in a guise more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
He wants to be President of Europe. He wants to be the one-man incarnation of the wishes of 500 million people and 27 countries. He wants to be the answer to the decades old question originally posed by Henry Kissinger: "Who should the President of the United States ring if he wants to be put in urgent contact with Europe?" >>> Boris Johnson | Monday, October 05, 2009
