TONY! The Blair Musical the Pleasance Theatre, Islington, for a limited run in late September 2007. The production returned to the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2008, alongside its sequel "Tony of Arabia". Previews were performed at the Oxford North Wall and the Theatre Royal, Wakefield, in July 2008. The production begins with a news reporter announcing the fall of Tony Blair, before the erstwhile prime minister is carried onstage, funeral-style, by four pallbearers, to melancholic chants of "Tony!". He is then thrown to the ground to the crash of a drum fill, where he begins to sing the opening number, "Tony's Entrance," in which
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom decision-making. Former ministers such as Clare Short and Chris Smith have criticised the lack of decision-making power in Cabinet. When she resigned, Short denounced "the centralisation of power into the hands of the Prime Minister and an increasingly small number of advisers". Graham Allen (a Government Whip during Tony Blair's first government) made the case in "The Last Prime Minister: Being Honest About the UK Presidency" (2003) that in fact the office of prime minister has presidential powers. However, the presidentialisation thesis has been extensively criticised as well. Keith Dowding, for example, argues that British Prime Ministers are already more