Counterblast: how Tony Blair fed the feral beast of the media and savaged the criminal justice system

In a valedictory speech as Prime Minister in June 2007, Tony Blair attacked the British media for, at times, making his job virtually impossible. His widely-reported description of the Fourth Estate as a ‘feral beast’ was flung back at him in many newspaper editorials as an egregious case of the pot calling the kettle black, given New Labour's obsessive massaging of the press during the previous decade-and-a-half. Picking over the shrapnel of this falling-out has been of some interest to media studies and politics students but what about the criminological impact of the collusion between Blair and the press overlords? How much of the widespread impatience bordering on contempt for ‘due process’ is attributable to the waning meteor called Tony Blair?