Tony Blair was dining in hip East London restaurant Tramshed and got a bit more than he bargained for when barman Twiggy Garcia (who is also a DJ and producer, like every barman in East London) approached him and tried to arrest him for crimes against peace over the War In Iraq in 2002.
Twiggy approached him, placed his hand on his shoulder and stated: ‘Mr Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq’. Tony then tried to get into a debate with Twiggy before one of his sons went to get security. Twiggy then left the restaurant to avoid any further trouble, but figured that his point had been made.
Twiggy was inspired to try and arrest Blair thanks to the website arrestblair.com which encourages individuals to approach Tony Blair and place him under arrest for his role in the war in Iraq. Obviously as it is just regular people performing these arrests they are all largely symbolic, but a bounty is offered by the website if they are reported in the media, so it looks as though Twiggy will be getting somewhat of a payday following his escapades on Monday. The idea behind this is to keep Mr Blair’s ‘crimes’ in the public eye and encourage the authorities to actually try and prosecute him.
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Twiggy was interviewed by Vice – duh! – and explained how everything went down when he saw Tony Blair walk into Tramshed: ‘My heart rate increased when I found out he was in the building; there was a eerie presence, which some of the other staff noticed too. I went on the arrestblair website to see how to perform a citizen’s arrest’.
‘I went over to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said: “Mr Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq. I am inviting you to accompany me to a police station to answer the charge’.
‘He said, “No, shouldn’t you be worried about Syria?” and I replied that I can only address things that are within my grasp at any one time. Then he asked me, “But don’t you agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator and he needed to be removed?” and I replied “Not by an illegal war.” Then he started talking about how lots of people died in the 1980s.’
The eerie presence is probably my favourite part of this story. Or perhaps the way that Twiggy so eloquently put forward his grievances with Mr Blair over how he handled the Iraq conflict. Oh wait, that didn’t happen and when he asked to have a debate with him he just walked off. Sounds like he really knew what was going on with all that. Still, I guess we can be thankful he didn’t go into Beast Mode.
On the flipside of this, Tony Blair’s office has released the following statement about the incident: ‘There is nothing to report here apart from fact that Mr Blair did offer to discuss the issue – that offer was declined and the individual walked off. Nothing else happened. Everyone is fine and they had a great time at the restaurant’.
So it sounds like absolutely nothing was accomplished by this encounter. I guess it’s kinda LOLZ though sure.
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