Blair happy to keep guitar from Bono – but not one from Mexico's president
He did, however, question whether he would have to pay 'the full purchase price'.
No 10 officials suggested the prime minister, who fronted a rock band called Ugly Rumours in his student days, might want to take the same approach when it came to a white Fender Stratocaster, valued at £2,500, from the Canadian singer Bryan Adams.
However, Mr Blair was much less enthusiastic about an acoustic Vargas guitar presented to him by President Vicente Fox during an official visit to Mexico in 2001, noting: 'I don't actually use it.'
The files also show that Mr Blair rejected advice that he should not keep a Pro Braided tennis racket given to him by the manufacturer, Slazenger.
Officials feared that it was part of a 'marketing ploy' by the company and suggested it should be donated to a children's charity as 'you cannot be seen to endorse any product'.
Mr Blair, however, instructed them just to thank the company, adding: 'It is very churlish to refuse to use it.'
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Scottish Sun
3 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Five off-limit attractions in the UK offering free secret tours – including 10 Downing Street
Plus, other buildings you can explore for the first time I'M DOWN Five off-limit attractions in the UK offering free secret tours – including 10 Downing Street Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THERE is nothing more exciting than getting to explore a place where visitors are usually not allowed. Think: Downing Street, the BBC Broadcasting House and the BT Tower. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 5 As part of the Open House Festival, the public can explore a number of places they usually can't access for free Credit: Getty Win one of 8 incredible holidays to the Caribbean, Mexico and Greece by voting in The Sun's Travel Awards - enter to win here And as part of London's Open House Festival, there are over 700 properties, buildings and places where the public will be welcomed to visit between September 13 and 21. Five of these are offering extremely exclusive limited tours, with a public ballet now open until August 18. According to the Open House Festival website, many of the destinations will be a "be once in a lifetime visit". Here are the five places you can enter the ballot for, as well as what dates you will be able to visit. 10 Downing Street The home of British Prime Ministers since 1735 will open its doors to the public for two sessions on September 13. Guests will get to see behind the famous black door, where some of the most important decisions in UK politics are made. Currently, 10 Downing Street is undergoing some upgrades to its facilities to ensure the historic building is preserved. BBC Broadcasting House We all know the BBC and see content from it daily, but for the Open House Festival people can go to the first ever purpose-built broadcast centre in the UK. It was built back in 1932 and features an art-deco design, including a clock tower. More recently the building was refurbished and extended to create a new broadcasting house. Inside multi-million pound upgrade for popular Scots tourist attraction The building is now home to the largest live newsroom in Europe, right at the centre of the complex. Again, to go to this spot you will need to enter the ballot, with 12, one-hour sessions on September 20. BT Tower When in the depths of London's streets, you can often catch glimpses of the BT Tower. The tower's famous revolving floor sits 158 metres above the streets of the capital. Two high speed lights will transport visitors to the revolving floor in just 30 seconds. Bizarrely, the Tower was classified as an 'official secret' until 1993 despite it being evident in the city's skyline. To see this building, you will also need to enter a ballot for one of 16 tours, each lasting 45 minutes across September 20 and 21. 5 You could head up the BT Tower which is soon set to be turned into a hotel Credit: Getty Canada House Canada House is to the Canadian Embassy and was originally designed as two buildings. Just over 10 years ago, the building underwent a large scale revitalisation linking it to the former Sun Life Assurance of Canada building. Inside today, the building houses around 300 pieces of Canadian Art. One tour will run on September 13. 5 Or head to Canada House which is home to the Canadian Embassy Credit: Alamy London Museum Currently under construction, the public can enter a ballot to go on a tour of the Poultry Market, at the new London Museum. The London Museum is set to open in 2026, bringing new life into the historic Smithfield market buildings. And with this tour, lucky visitors will get a sneak peak ahead of its opening. Six tours will be open to the public on September 20. The museum's permanent galleries are set to open in 2026 and the 1960s Poultry Market will open in 2028. The Poultry Market will eventually house the museum's collection stores and temporary exhibition and learning spaces. 5 And you could get the first glimpse of the new London Museum Credit: londonmuseum/Secchi Smith New locations for 2025 There are also a number of new destinations part of the festival this year including Studio AVC's offices - which are located in a 1929 shop which used to be Liberty's printing workshop and part of William Morris' Arts and Crafts legacy. Or you could head to The King's Foundation, in Hackney, which is set in a refurbished factory warehouse. And there is the London Film School as well, in a former banana warehouse. For architecture buffs, you can head inside the RIBA House of the Year from 2024. A new £100million indoor resort is also set to open in the UK with a 'next generation waterpark' and thermal spas. Plus, a much-loved UK theme park reveals new rainy day guarantee – with free return after bad weather.
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Telegraph
The 1939 manual that shows Trump how to wreck Russia's economy
It is unlikely that Donald Trump will tour the National Archives in Kew during his state visit to Britain next month, but if the president were to find the time, he could study the original instruction manual on how to wreck a national economy. Deep in the vaults lies Britain's Handbook of Economic Warfare, circulated on August 14 1939 and kept secret – or 'under lock and key', according to the emphatic instruction on its cover – right up until 1990. Its 52 pages, compiled on the eve of the Second World War, amount to an elegantly-written manifesto for economic havoc, filled with relevance for today's decision-makers. Perhaps most of all for Trump, who could this week punish Vladimir Putin's refusal to agree a ceasefire in Ukraine by taking what the President's supporters call a 'sledgehammer' to the Russian economy. The hammer in question would be a raft of American sanctions with one vital difference: they would be targeted not on Russia itself, but on any country that buys Putin's oil, with the aim of depriving the Kremlin of its customers and suffocating its single biggest source of revenue. The objective of these 'secondary sanctions' would be to choke Russian finances so severely that Putin would have to sue for peace in Ukraine. That goal finds its echo in said British handbook. 'The aim of economic warfare,' reads chapter one, 'is to so disorganise the enemy's economy as to prevent him from carrying on the war'. This amounts to a 'military operation, comparable to the operations of the three services, in that its object is the defeat of the enemy.' The 'weapons' include 'interference with trade' and 'withholding financial, shipping and insurance facilities.' The word 'sanctions' does not appear in the handbook; instead chapter two proposes a 'statutory list' of 'firms' and 'vessels' with which all trade and any contact would be banned. Just as Trump wants to compel other countries to stop buying Russian oil, so the handbook stresses the necessity of 'persuading or inducing neutral governments, firms and persons to refrain from transactions advantageous to the enemy.' Indeed, such is the text's relevance that it is now said to be back in vogue in Whitehall. Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Black has reportedly pointed colleagues towards the handbook in recent months, claiming it will help guide them as Britain deals with threats from the likes of Putin's Russia. Trump must now decide whether secondary sanctions are the right tool of persuasion even though America has used them only sparingly in the past, mainly against Iran, and no other Western country has resorted to them at all. Even the handbook, written when war was imminent, stops short of recommending them. On the surface, the president and his allies seem unrestrained. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator representing South Carolina, has introduced a bill that would impose 500 per cent tariffs on any country buying Russian 'petroleum products', describing this as a 'sledgehammer available to President Trump to end this war' and a sanction of 'bone-breaking' power. Ukraine certainly hopes so. On Sunday, one of President Zelensky's key advisers, Andriy Yermak, said that Russia's economy was 'holding on only through the sale of energy resources' and it would be possible to 'strangle' Putin's revenues with 'secondary tariffs proposed in the USA.' On July 28, Trump said that Putin had '10 or 12 days' to accept a ceasefire in Ukraine or face unspecified consequences, a deadline that the White House later clarified would expire this Friday. Earlier, the president had threatened 'tariffs at about 100 per cent – you'd call them secondary tariffs' on any country importing Putin's oil. The biggest targets would be China and India, which buy nearly 75 per cent of Russia's seaborne oil exports. If Trump is in earnest, then the world's second and fifth biggest economies respectively will this week suffer American tariffs of 100 per cent, though there seems no immediate prospect of him endorsing Senator Graham's bill and its penalty of 500 per cent. The president is a master of bombast and empty threats, but the oil price still responded to his words by climbing above $70 per barrel. Faced with a choice between punitive US tariffs or abandoning Russian oil, China and India would probably have to choose the latter and cut Putin loose. Thanks to Russia's dependence on just two customers, that would make a big difference to Moscow's revenues. In June alone, Russia earned more than £6 billion by selling 2 million barrels of oil a day to China and 1.5 million to India. Add in exports of coal, gas and refined oil products, and Russia received a total of about £7.5 billion from the two countries in one month – representing about half of the Kremlin's global fossil fuel revenues. 'If those markets are lost, then clearly this would have a serious impact on Russia,' says Jonathan Eyal, an associate director of the Royal United Services Institute. 'But as always with the oil market, it's swings and roundabouts.' Secondary sanctions, if imposed, might be too successful for their own good. By choking off Russian oil, they could unbalance the market and cause the price to rise, damaging the world economy and forcing Trump's voters to pay more to fill up their cars. A higher price would also allow Putin to earn more from any remaining exports. Thanks to sanctions, Russian oil already sells at a discount on the market price. If that baseline was higher, then the Kremlin could raise more revenue even with the discount. And how would the sudden imposition of punitive tariffs on China square with Trump's wish to negotiate a trade deal with the world's second biggest economy? On Friday, Trump enacted a 25 per cent tariff on India in retaliation for its supposed protectionism against US exports. But he had publicly threatened an extra 'penalty' for the country's purchases of Russian oil. So far, no such 'penalty' has appeared and India's tariff is still lower than Canada's 35 per cent. Eyal points out that Trump has not yet given his backing to the Graham bill, and the president's separate announcements are 'muddying the waters', creating a 'typical Trump mess.' But there is no doubt that imposing different tariffs based on whether countries comply with America's foreign policy objectives violates World Trade Organisation rules. And deliberately placing a sovereign state under unbearable pressure to stop doing business with another sovereign state could break international law. 'As a principle, we've always argued that these measures are illegal because they effectively extend US jurisdiction to other countries,' says Eyal. Britain's Handbook of Economic Warfare from 1939 notes another familiar risk, namely that neutral countries, 'if pressed too hard', could 'throw in their lot with the enemy', just as excessive American pressure on China and India might drive them closer to Russia. Even when the Second World War was imminent, the British Government weighed the risks and decided against imposing secondary sanctions on neutral countries doing business with Nazi Germany. 'There will be no Secondary Statutory list,' says the handbook. 'That is to say, neutral traders will not be penalised merely for continuing to trade with another who has been placed on the Statutory List.' But the text stresses the importance of maintaining an artful pretence that secondary sanctions might at any moment be imposed, noting how this bluff had been highly effective during the First World War. 'The fear, which was discreetly fostered, that a Secondary Statutory List, might be enforced proved, however, extremely efficacious during the war of 1914-18,' says the handbook. 'There is evidence that some firms on the Statutory List were virtually boycotted by other firms for fear of consequences that we had no intention of permitting.' In the same way, just the possibility of America imposing secondary sanctions has already made companies in China and India and elsewhere wary of doing business with Russia. The fact that Putin must sell his oil at a discount is proof of this chilling effect. Yet Putin's incessant drone and missile attacks on Kyiv, which killed 31 people in one night last Thursday, suggest that he does not believe that Trump will go ahead with secondary sanctions against Russia's biggest economic partners. Instead, Putin's assaults on Ukrainian cities suggest that he is determined to ignore what he thinks is Trump's bluster. It will soon become clear whether Putin is right and the president is bluffing just as surely as Britain was in 1939. If not, this could be the week when Trump takes up his sledgehammer and wields it against Russia with a severity that would exceed Britain's actions against Nazi Germany in the countdown to war.
Reuters
19 hours ago
- Reuters
Canada airdrops aid into Gaza, says Israel violating international law
Aug 4 (Reuters) - Canada said on Monday it delivered humanitarian assistance through airdrops to Gaza, which has been under a devastating Israeli military assault for almost 22 months, with Ottawa again accusing Israel of violating international law. "The (Canadian Armed Forces) employed a CC-130J Hercules aircraft to conduct an airdrop of critical humanitarian aid in support of Global Affairs Canada into the Gaza Strip. The air drop consisted of 21,600 pounds of aid," the Canadian government said in a statement. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that it was Canadian Armed Forces' first humanitarian airdrop over Gaza using their own aircraft. The Israeli military said 120 food aid packages for Gaza's residents were airdropped by six countries, including Canada. The other five were Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Germany and Belgium. Canada said last week it plans to recognize the State of Palestine at a meeting of the United Nations in September, ratcheting up pressure on Israel as starvation spreads in Gaza. Canada also said on Monday that Israeli restrictions have posed challenges for humanitarian agencies. "This obstruction of aid is a violation of international humanitarian law and must end immediately," Canada's government said. The Israeli embassy in Ottawa had no immediate comment. Israel denies accusations of violating international law and blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza. Israel cut off food supplies to Gaza in March and then lifted that blockade in May - but with restrictions that it said were needed to prevent aid from being diverted to militant groups. President Donald Trump also claimed Hamas militants were stealing food coming into Gaza and selling it. However, Reuters reported late last month that an internal U.S. government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft by Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies. Israel says it is taking steps for more aid to reach Gaza's population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, allowing airdrops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys. The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered in October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, Israeli tallies show. Gaza's health ministry says Israel's subsequent military assault has killed over 60,000 Palestinians. It has also caused a hunger crisis, internally displaced Gaza's entire population and prompted accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Israel denies the accusations.
