Blair's ex aide: Netanyahu an 'armour-plated bullshitter'

By JPOST.COM STAFF

Published: JANUARY 21, 2011 09:19

blair netanyahu 311 (photo credit: Moshe Milner, GPO) — blair netanyahu 311

(photo credit: Moshe Milner, GPO)

Alistair Campbell, in diary excerpts from 1998 released to Guardian, quoted as saying that former UK prime minister did not trust Israel.

Britain believed that then Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was an "armour-plated bullshitter", former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications chief Alistair Campbell was quoted as writing in 1998, The Guardian reported Thursday.

The UK newspaper quoted Campbell as saying in a recently published diary "We had a meeting with [Ehud] Barak, who was OK but not everything he had been cracked up to be. He said he was pessimistic because Bibi was a total bullshitter."

"Tony Blair thought the Israelis bugged him during his first visit to the country," Campbell went on to write in the in the second volume of his diaries.

"The three of us traveled back together, [Tony Blair] doing his little finger-whirl to indicate the assumption the car was bugged so we did the usual how well it had all gone blah," Campbell wrote, according to The Guardian.

Campbell also commented on former Blair fundraiser and Mideast envoy Lord Michael Levy, saying, according to the quotes in The Guardian regarding the same 1998 Israel visit, that Levy was "hiding behind [Derek] Plumbly [Middle East and North Africa director, FCO] and saying he was deliberately hiding."

"Lord Levy, Labour's former fundraiser and Blair's envoy to the Middle East, had an irritating habit of popping up in pictures," Blairs former aide was quoted as saying.