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Updated Thursday, September 2, 2010 11:00 am TWN, By Jill Lawless, AP



	Copies of Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair's book are seen displayed at a bookshop in London, Wednesday, Sept. 1. (AP/AFP) More Photos (2)

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UK's Blair cried for Iraq victims, found Brown irritating: memoir

At home, he is a more polarizing figure. Swept to power in 1997 on a wave of popular enthusiasm, Blair left office a decade later reviled by many for taking Britain into the U.S.-led Iraq war, and viewed as a liability by much of his own Labour Party.

"He began as a leader who was a friend of everyone, and he finished as a friend of almost no one in Britain," said Blair biographer Anthony Seldon.

Anti-war groups say they will picket Blair's book signings in Dublin on Saturday and in London on Sept. 8. Both are high-security affairs at which book buyers will have to surrender their bags, cameras and mobile phones -- and are barred from asking for personal dedications.

Blair, 57, stepped down in June 2007 after a decade that included a historic peace accord in Northern Ireland, the deeply unpopular war in Iraq and the continuing conflict in Afghanistan.

He was Labour's most successful leader for decades, moved the left-leaning party toward the center and brought it back to power after 18 years in opposition.

But when he left, after years of increasingly open hostility with Brown, his party was divided.

In the book, Blair calls Brown "difficult, at times maddening," but says "he was also strong, capable and brilliant."

"Political calculation, yes," Blair writes. "Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero."

Brown, and Labour, lost power in an election in May, and Blair does not exactly heap praise on his time in office.

"It is easy to say now, in the light of his tenure as prime minister, that I should have stopped it; at the time that would have been well nigh impossible," Blair writes.

He also details his interaction with Queen Elizabeth II in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, when support for the British monarchy was at a low ebb. Blair said he tried to get the queen to make a public statement and worried that she found him "presumptuous." For his part, he said she was "a little haughty."

Elsewhere, Blair speaks of his relationship with alcohol, saying he drank "a whisky or a gin and tonic before dinner, then one or two glasses of wine." Blair said that while he believed he controlled his intake, he had been aware that drink was becoming "a support."

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