Tony Blair’s attack on the media may or may not be fair. But it does illustrate an iron law of British politics. All prime ministers end up fearing and hating the press.

The first time I interviewed Blair - shortly after he became PM in 1997 - he made rather a point of underlining that he was going to avoid this particular pitfall. I remember him saying with a laugh that his predecessor - John Major - had been so obsessive about the newspapers that he had anxiously checked the first editions at 11 at night. "I don’t bother with all that," said Blair with an airy laugh.

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We are all familiar with the clichés about American insularity: the number of Congressmen who don’t have a passport, the number of Americans who have never left the US – and so on.

But, as I come to the end of a week in Washington, my overwhelming impression is how incredibly outward-looking intellectual life is in this city compared with London – despite the fact that London flatters itself that it is now the world’s most international city.

On Monday I went to a speaker-meeting at the New American Foundation – one of the plethora of DC-based think tanks, dealing with world affairs. The subject was the future of Pakistan and the speaker was a prominent Pakistani journalist. The room was packed. By contrast, I remember going to a speaker-meeting in London about a year ago with a much more obviously star-studded cast – Bill Kristol, a key neoconservative thinker; Tariq Ramadan, a central figure in the debate about Europe and Islam; and Phil Gordon, one of the leading experts on US foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The meeting attracted maybe 30 people. You could get more people than that to turn up and listen to the deputy head of the OSCE, in Washington. (more…)