SHOCKWAVES FROM Tony Blair’s memoir, ‘A Journey’, have rippled through political circles this week, angering and astounding many – not least over his apparent change of heart on his government’s ban of fox hunting.

In his book, the former prime minister admitted that the decision to ban the sport was “a disaster” and that he had initially agreed to a ban without understanding the issue.

However, Mr Blair claims he ensured that the 2004 Hunting Act was “a masterly British compromise” that left enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue “provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed.”

“The passions aroused by the issue were primeval,” wrote Mr Blair. “If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble for it.”

Mr Blair also wrote that during a trip to Italy he spoke to the mistress of a hunt near Oxford, after which he realised banning hunting was the wrong thing to do.

“She took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it and did it with an effect that completely convinced me,” Mr Blair said, which led him, he claims, to ensure that loopholes would allow hunting to go on.

The pro-hunting Countryside Alliance was far from impressed by the ex-PM’s u-turn: “The law that was passed was not ‘a masterly British compromise,’ it was a craven retreat from evidence and logic for short term political ends.

“If there is any compromise it is in the enforcement of the law, and Blair can claim no credit for passing an Act which is both so illogical and so reviled by every single person that it is meant to affect that the police take the view that they have better things to do than try and make it work.”

“Tony Blair’s re-writing of history is not going to fool anyone,” added the Alliance. “The fact that he knew what he was doing was wrong makes his actions more reprehensible, not less.”