Tony Blair: I Drank Too Much

Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, has just hit stores, and it’s loaded with juicy revelations that have Britain talking. Among them:

• Blair says he used alcohol as “a prop,” with his daily intake “definitely at the outer limit” of what was acceptable. “By the standards of days gone by I was not even remotely a topper,” he protests, adding that his intake was “not excessively excessive. I had a limit.”
• Much of the headlines have been dominated by his always-rumored but until now denied feud with Gordon Brown. Blair says he knew Brown would be a “disastrous” prime minister, and blames him for the party’s recent losses

• He also reveals that when they were vying to lead the party in 1994, Brown accidentally locked himself in the bathroom. “Withdraw from the contest or I'm leaving you in there,” Blair told him.
• Of his relationship with Princess Diana, he writes: “We were both, in our own way, manipulators—good at grasping the feelings of others and instinctively playing on them.”
• He also discusses the extramarital affairs of his colleagues. Such trysts, he writes, “spring you from that prison of self-control. … Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue and issues and endless machinations and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure.”

(More Tony Blair stories.)