Tony Blair - Forum Network

Maybe I should start by explaining I follow a great deal more podcasts than I listen to. I like to be subscribed in my RSS reader of choice and simply browse through the titles in order to know what is going on in the feed. I will give a quick listen left or right, but that kind of browsing does not frequently lead to reviewing. And so, it could happen, that I had been following the podcast Forum-Network for years without ever reviewed it. So here is a first. (feed)

I would want to recommend to you, listening to the issue of 16 September, in which Tina Brown interviews Tony Blair about his political life, which is also the title of the book Blair recently published: My Political Life. Brown seems to be off with too much praise for a good interview. And for a moment I felt this podcast would, yet again, not be reviewed as it could not manage to keep me engaged. Yet, soon enough, Brown drops the sweetening up and builds some challenging interrogation for the former prime minister.

Blair, in turn, avoids that common pitfall for politicians in interviews to just cough up standardized, evasive and non-committal answers that make politician interviews frequently so irritatingly tedious and unimaginative. Maybe it is his elevated skill and maybe it is the circumstance of his retirement from British politics that he can simply afford to be more candid about his career as a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. By all means, I was fascinated and listened in suspense while he told about the details of how his politics worked and especially about his cooperation with Clinton and with Bush afterwards.

Note that on the site, you can even watch the interview. I listened of course to the audio which is podcast.