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Blair, Tony PM lbr

ODDLY BLANK 6 26

SELLOUT? AI ELLISON

TENEO CONSULT?

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OCT

new Skydance has unveiled its board of directors, effective immediately, led by chairman and CEO David Ellison and including newcomers Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of Emerson Collective, and Bobby Kotick, founder and former CEO of Activision.

They will service as independent directors.

Co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, who joined Skydance last week, also has a seat.

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Powell Jobs is highly influential leader in business and philanthropy and committed investor in journalism and media. Her nonprofit Emerson Collective investments include majority stakes in The Atlantic and Anonymous Content.

Kotick served as CEO of Activision for 32 years, building it into one of the world’s most successful video game companies before selling Activision Blizzard to Microsoft for $68.7 billion.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will join as a Board Advisor. Blair, who will be acting in a personal capacity, is Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a not-for-profit that helps leaders govern in the age of AI. Paramount said his global leadership experience and commitment to innovation position him as an invaluable advisor in shaping Skydance’s strategic priorities.

The other directors are continuing on from the board of Paramount, which was renamed Skydance this morning after closing its merger with Warner Bros Discovery.

“I am delighted to welcome Laurene and Bobby to our Board and honored to have Tony join us as an Advisor,” Ellison said. “Together with our other directors, they bring the experience and fresh perspectives we need to build Skydance into an extraordinary company, one that honors the legacies of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery while setting a bold course for the future.”

RELATED: RELATED: Skydance Putting All 3 TV Studios Under George Cheeks: Warner Bros. TV, CBS Studios, PTVS – The Dish

The full Skydance board:

David Ellison, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Skydance

Barbara Byrne, Former Vice Chairman of Barclays PLC (Independent Director)

Andy Campion, Chairman and CEO of Unrivaled Sports (Independent Director)

Gerry Cardinale, Founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Investment Officer, RedBird Capital Partners

Safra A. Catz, Executive Vice Chair and Former CEO, Oracle Corporation

Andy Gordon, President of Skydance

Justin G. Hamill, Managing Director and Chief Legal Officer, Silver Lake (Independent Director)

Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder and President, Emerson Collective (Independent Director)

Bobby Kotick, Founder and former CEO of Activision (Independent Director)

Ynon Kreiz, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Skydance

Sherry Lansing, Former Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures (Independent Director)

Paul Marinelli, President, Lawrence Investments, LLC

John L. Thornton, Chairman of RedBird Capital Partners

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OFFICIAL?

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007

institute.global

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KAREN HAO EMPIRE AI 6 26

Another “Rare” Intervention from Tony Blai Larry Ellison & Oracl59:01LINK

57:37

AI Overview

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Oracle founder Larry Ellison Oracle have formed a major technological and political alliance centered on advancing Artificial Intelligence. Through massive financial backing, joint advocacy, and corporate partnerships, they are reshaping how governments integrate AI. [1, 2, 3]

Financial Ties and the Tony Blair Institute

Global AI and Data Initiatives

Shared Vision for Reimagining Government 1]

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6 26 NOT TALK

Tony Blair - Wikipedia

Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He was Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997, held shadow cabinet posts from 1987 to 1994, and was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007. He is the second-longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history after Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving Labour politician to have held the office and the only person to lead Labour to three consecutive general election victories. Blair founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in 2016 and serves as its Executive Chairman.

Blair attended the independent school Fettes College, studied law at St John's College, Oxford, and worked as a barrister. He became involved in the Labour Party and was elected to the House of Commons in 1983 for Sedgefield. Blair supported moving Labour to the political centre of British politics. He was appointed to Neil Kinnock's shadow cabinet in 1988 and as shadow home secretary by John Smith in 1992. Following Smith's death in 1994, Blair won the Labour leadership election, and went on to rebrand the party as "New Labour". He became the youngest prime minister of the 20th century after Labour won a landslide of 418 seats in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years in opposition. It was the first Labour victory for 23 years.

During his first term, Blair enacted constitutional reforms and increased public spending on healthcare and education, while introducing market-based reforms in these areas. He introduced a minimum wage, tuition fees for higher education, devolution in Scotland and Wales, expansion of LGBTQ rights and significant progress in the Northern Ireland peace process with the landmark Good Friday Agreement. He oversaw interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000, which were successful.

Blair secured a second term with another landslide victory in 2001. These years in office were shaped by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, resulting in the war on terror. Blair supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had British Forces participate in the Iraq War, on the false beliefs that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and had developed ties with al-Qaeda. The invasion was controversial; it attracted widespread opposition and 139 of Blair's MPs opposed it. As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was accused of misleading Parliament and his popularity dropped. He won a third term in the 2005 general election, but with a reduced majority. He pushed for more public sector reform and brokered an agreement to restore powersharing in Northern Ireland. Amid the Cash-for-Honours scandal, Blair was interviewed as a witness and not under caution. In 2006, Blair announced he would resign within a year. He resigned as party leader and as prime minister in June 2007, and was succeeded by Gordon Brown, his chancellor; on the day he ceased to be prime minister, he gave up his parliamentary seat.

Blair was immediately appointed special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, a post that he held until 2015. He has been chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change since 2016, has made political interventions, and has been an influence on Keir Starmer. In 2009, Blair was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. Blair has been among the most popular and unpopular politicians in British history; as prime minister, he achieved the highest recorded approval ratings in his first term but one of the lowest after the Iraq War.[1][2][3][4] The 2016 Iraq Inquiry report gave a damning assessment of Blair's role in the Iraq War. Blair is rated as above average in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers.

Early years

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born on 6 May 1953 at Queen Mary Maternity Home in Lauriston, Edinburgh, Scotland.[5][6][7][8] He was the second son of Leo Charles Lynton Blair (1923–2012) and Hazel Elizabeth Rosaleen Blair (née Corscadden; 1923–1975).[9] Leo Blair was the illegitimate son of two entertainers and was adopted as a baby by the Glasgow shipyard worker James Blair and his wife, Mary.[10] Hazel Corscadden was the daughter of George Corscadden, a butcher and Orangeman who moved to Glasgow in 1916, and in 1923 returned to (and later died in) Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in Ireland. In Ballyshannon, Corscadden's wife, Sarah Margaret (née Lipsett), gave birth above the family's grocery shop to Blair's mother, Hazel.[11][12]

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Prime Minister (1997–2007)

Further information: Premiership of Tony Blair, First Blair ministry, Second Blair ministry, and Third Blair ministry

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Bill_Clinton_greets_British_Prime_Minister_Tony_Blair_in_Belfast_%28cropped%29.jpg)

Blair with US president Bill Clinton in Belfast, September 1998

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_George_W._Bush_and_Prime_Minister_Tony_Blair_at_Camp_David,_23_February_2001.jpg)

Blair with US president George W. Bush at Camp David, February 2001

Blair became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 2 May 1997; following Labour's landslide victory at the 1997 general election, aged 43, he was the youngest person to reach that office since Lord Liverpool became prime minister aged 42 in 1812.[77] He was also the first prime minister born after the Second World War and the accession of Elizabeth II to the throne. With victories in 1997, 2001, and 2005, Blair was the Labour Party's longest-serving prime minister,[78] and the first person to lead the party to three consecutive general election victories.[79]

Northern Ireland

Addressing a crowd in Armagh, 1998

His contribution towards assisting the Northern Ireland peace process by helping to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement was widely recognised.[80][81] Following the Omagh bombing on 15 August 1998, by members of the Real IRA opposed to the peace process, which killed 29 people and wounded hundreds, Blair visited the County Tyrone town and met victims at Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.[82]

Military intervention and the war on terror

In his first six years in office, Blair ordered British troops into combat five times, more than any other prime minister in British history. This included Iraq in both 1998 and 2003, Kosovo (1999), Sierra Leone (2000) and Afghanistan (2001).[83]

Shaking hands with US president George W. Bush at a NATO summit in Turkey, June 2004

The Kosovo War, which Blair had advocated on moral grounds, was initially a failure when it relied solely on air strikes; the threat of a ground offensive convinced Serbia's Slobodan Milošević to withdraw. Blair had been a major advocate for a ground offensive, which US President Bill Clinton was reluctant to do, and ordered that 50,000 soldiers – most of the available British Army – should be made ready for action.[84] The following year, the limited Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone swiftly swung the tide against the rebel forces; before deployment, the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone had been on the verge of collapse.[85] Palliser had been intended as an evacuation mission but Brigadier David Richards was able to convince Blair to allow him to expand the role; at the time, Richards' action was not known and Blair was assumed to be behind it.[86]

Blair ordered Operation Barras, a highly successful SAS/Parachute Regiment strike to rescue hostages from a Sierra Leone rebel group.[87] Journalist Andrew Marr has argued that the success of ground attacks, real and threatened, over air strikes alone was influential on how Blair planned the Iraq War, and that the success of the first three wars Blair fought "played to his sense of himself as a moral war leader".[88] When asked in 2010 if the success of Palliser may have "embolden[ed] British politicians" to think of military action as a policy option, General Sir David Richards admitted there "might be something in that".[86]

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blair_Bush_Whitehouse_%282004-11-12%29.jpg)Shaking hands with Bush after their press conference in the East Room of the White House, November 2004

From the start of the war on terror in 2001, Blair strongly supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, participating in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was particularly controversial, for it attracted widespread public opposition and 139 of Blair's own MPs opposed it.[89] As a result, he faced criticism over the policy itself and the circumstances of the decision. Alastair Campbell described Blair's statement that the intelligence on WMDs was "beyond doubt" as his "assessment of the assessment that was given to him".[90] Blair himself wrote in the foreword to the September Dossier that Iraq's military planning allowed for some weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.[91] In 2009, Blair stated that he would have supported removing Saddam Hussein from power even in the face of proof that he had no such weapons.[92] Playwright Harold Pinter and former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Blair of war crimes.[93]

Testifying before the Iraq Inquiry on 29 January 2010, Blair said Saddam Hussein was a "monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world."[94] Blair said that British and American attitude towards Hussein had "changed dramatically" after the September 11 attacks. Blair denied that he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even if he had thought Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. He said he believed the world was safer as a result of the invasion.[95] He said there was "no real difference between wanting regime change and wanting Iraq to disarm: regime change was US policy because Iraq was in breach of its UN obligations."[96]

In an October 2015 CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria, Blair apologised for his "mistakes" over the Iraq War and admitted there were "elements of truth" to the view that the invasion helped promote the rise of ISIS.[97] The Chilcot Inquiry report of 2016 gave a damning assessment of Blair's role in the Iraq War, though the former prime minister again refused to apologise for his decision to back the US-led invasion.[98]

Relationship with Parliament

One of Blair's first acts as prime minister was to replace the then twice-weekly 15-minute sessions of Prime Minister's Questions held on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a single 30-minute session on Wednesdays. In addition to PMQs, Blair held monthly press conferences at which he fielded questions from journalists[99] and, from 2002, broke precedent by agreeing to give evidence twice yearly before the most senior Commons select committee, the Liaison Committee.[100] Blair was sometimes perceived as paying insufficient attention both to the views of his own Cabinet colleagues and to those of the House of Commons.[101][102] His style was sometimes criticised as not that of a prime minister and head of government, which he was, but of a president and head of state, which he was not.[103] Blair was accused of excessive reliance on spin.[104][105] He was the first UK prime minister to have been formally questioned by police, though not under caution, while still in office.[106]

Events before resignation

For a chronological guide, see 2007 Labour Party leadership election (UK).

Blair in Poland, 2007

As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was accused of misleading Parliament,[107][108] and his popularity dropped as a result,[109][110] with Labour's overall majority at the 2005 election reduced from 167 to 66 seats. As a combined result of the Blair–Brown pact, the Iraq War and low approval ratings, pressure built up within the Labour Party for Blair to resign.[111] Over the summer of 2006, many MPs criticised Blair for not calling for a ceasefire in the Israel–Lebanon conflict.[112] On 7 September 2006, Blair publicly stated he would step down as leader by the time of the Trades Union Congress conference held from 10 to 13 September 2007,[113] despite promising to serve a full term during the previous general election campaign. On 10 May 2007, during a speech at the Trimdon Labour Club, Blair announced his intention to resign as both Labour leader and prime minister,[114] triggering a leadership election in which Brown was the only candidate.[115]

At a special party conference in Manchester on 24 June 2007, Blair formally handed over the leadership of the Labour Party to Brown, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Blair's three ministries.[116] Blair tendered his resignation as prime minister on 27 June and Brown assumed office the same afternoon. Blair resigned from his Sedgefield seat in the traditional form of accepting the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, to which he was appointed by Brown in one of the latter's last acts as chancellor;[117] the resulting by-election was won by Labour candidate Phil Wilson.[118] Blair decided not to issue a list of Resignation Honours, making him the first prime minister of the modern era not to do so.[119]

Policies

Further information: Blairism

In 2001, Blair said, "We are a left of centre party, pursuing economic prosperity and social justice as partners and not as opposites."[120] Blair rarely applies such labels to himself; he promised before the 1997 election that New Labour would govern "from the radical centre", and according to one lifelong Labour Party member always described himself as a social democrat.[121] In a 2007 opinion piece in The Guardian, left-wing commentator Neil Lawson described Blair as to the right of centre.[122] A YouGov opinion poll in 2005 found that a small majority of British voters, including many New Labour supporters, placed Blair on the right of the political spectrum.[123] The Financial Times argued that Blair is not conservative but instead a populist.[124]

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