Why IS William holding private talks with Blair?

PRINCE Charles is said to have privately condemned Tony Blair’s role in the 2003 military invasion of Iraq and derided the Labour Prime Minister for behaving like the ‘poodle’ of then U.S. President George W. Bush.

Yet his son Prince William has apparently sought Blair’s counsel on the Middle East.

I can disclose that William held private talks at Kensington Palace on Monday with the permatanned moneybags who stepped down as a special envoy to the Middle East three years ago.

‘The Duke of Cambridge met with Mr Blair to discuss His Royal Highness’s visit earlier this year to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,’ confirms a palace spokesman.

It’s not clear why the future king felt the need to meet Blair, who was forced out of 10 Downing Street in 2007 and has since been lining his pockets by providing advice to despots around the world including Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev.

He currently runs a think-tank self-aggrandisingly called the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and campaigns against Brexit.

Robert Jobson’s explosive new biography, Charles At Seventy, which was serialised by this newspaper, details how the heir to the throne considered the Iraq war to be a bewildering mess. ‘Charles was diametrically opposed to the Blair-Bush Iraq War strategy,’ Jobson writes about the intelligence failings in the build-up to the invasion.

‘With a heavy dollop of irony, he scornfully dubbed the premier “our magnificent leader” whenever talking about him in private and derided him for ignoring the wealth of sound intelligence available to him at the time that contradicted the American view.’

Blair’s resignation in 2015 as special representative of the Quartet of powers seeking a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians came as little surprise. There has been growing disquiet in Britain, the U.S. and the EU over his extensive business activities in the Middle East — which have led to repeated accusations of conflicts of interest.