Tony Blair. Photograph courtesy of Chatham House
A shoreditch barman attempted to make a citizens arrest on former Prime Minister Tony Blair after he spotted him dining upstairs at the Tramshed restaurant.
Twiggy Garcia told Vice magazine:
He [Blair] was sitting at the head of a table upstairs with about eight other people eating dinner.
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. It wasn’t like any other night. I couldn’t believe he was there. His security were sitting at the bar directly in front of me and I got nervous because I thought they overheard me say, “Should I citizen’s arrest him?”
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”.
Blair declined Garcia’s offer, but did engage with him about the ongoing situation in Syria and other problems facing the Middle East, before one of his sons got up to fetch the plan-clothed security officers downstairs. Garcia then promptly quit his job and left.
This is not the first time that Tony Blair has been faced by citizens attempting to “arrest” him for his role in the Iraq war, with the website ArrestBlair.org offering a £2,150 bounty for anyone that successfully escorts him to a police station. British activist Tom Grundy attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest on Blair in Hong Kong in 2012, and during Blair’s appearance at the Leveson Inquiry, protester David Lawley-Wakelin publicly accused him of war crimes.
