We Work Out Who Is Lying: Tony Blair or Michael Wolff

This is what it looks like when two globe-straddling baby boomers get into a spat.

Notoriously unreliable, massively successful New York writer Michael Wolff has called notoriously notorious, massively wealthy freelance diplomat Tony Blair a "complete liar".

Blair has hit back, calling Wolff’s claims that he was angling for a job in the Trump administration – and that he told Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner that British intelligence services were spying on Trump on behalf of the Obama White House - a "complete fabrication" from "beginning to end".

VICE has spoken to both Michael Wolff and Tony Blair's spokesperson to further clarify their comments, but before that, some context.

At the beginning of the year, Fire and Fury – Wolff’s book about two years spent with the Trump campaign, and then the administration – was published. Appearing on the same day as Taylor Swift's album Reputation and containing just as many bitchy zingers, the book claims Trump never wanted to win the election, that no one around him wanted to win and that everyone who knows him thinks he’s totally incapable of doing much more than sitting in his pants eating cheeseburgers, talking nonsense on the telephone and pretending to be a big deal business guy. It has been a political blockbuster, going on to sell more copies than Swift's album.

Blair is a bit-part player in the book. He is described as someone who had been cultivating Jared Kushner since meeting him in 2010 on the banks of the River Jordan, at the christening of Rupert Murdoch’s two young daughters. Once Kushner became a key man in the White House, in swooped Blair, Cheshire cat smile in place, to curry favour and ask for a job as Middle East envoy.

Apart from that, Blair doesn’t feature. But in January, when the book came out, he refuted the story. At that time, Wolff said that he was "confident of his sources" – who, presumably, had told him about Blair’s claims. On Sunday, Andrew Marr asked Wolff to defend his story and he did, saying he’d been sitting on a couch 15 feet from Kushner and Blair, and that the former PM had been "sucking up" to Ivanka Trump’s husband and was hoping to get a job. Blair was a "complete liar" for suggesting otherwise.

Reached for comment, Tony Blair’s spokesperson told VICE that, "Mr Blair has never met President Trump and is on the record regarding meeting Jared Kushner to discuss the Middle East peace process." There was a meeting between Blair and Kushner at the White House, but the spokesperson added: "Michael Wolff has never been present at any conversation between Jared Kushner and Mr Blair. He neither sought such a role from Jared Kushner nor was offered one. And we note that many people have had the same experience with Michael Wolff. Our position is crystal clear, we are not the ones engaged in making wild claims in order to sell books."

Michael Wolff hit back, telling VICE in an email that: "I was not privy to Blair’s White House meetings (those details I have from others), but I did overhear Kushner and Blair chatting as Blair left the West Wing, and, considering Kushner's gross lack of stature in the world of diplomacy and experience in the Middle East, it sure seemed like Blair, thickly laying on the flattery, was sucking up. This fit with reports of others in the White House that Blair believed he could become one of Kushner's gurus."

The fact that both men have previously been accused of playing fast and loose with the truth doesn’t help anyone who cares to try to work out which version of events to believe.

On the one hand, we have Blair, Mr Weapons of Mass Destruction himself, with his dodgy dossier, his "With you, whatever" deal with George W Bush and his ignoring of official warnings that Iraq would descend into chaos after the invasion. John Chilcot said Blair was "not straight with the nation", which is about as close as a hamstrung public servant can come to calling a former prime minister an enormous liar.

On the other hand, we have Wolff, a man who has written that "paying attention to details is not cool", who has characterised Rupert Murdoch as a "sun god" and who admitted himself that he can't be certain everything contained within Fire and Fury is true.

A creature of New York media, Wolff is enamoured with power. Rupert Murdoch and former Fox head honcho Roger Ailes are, incredibly, two of the most warmly drawn characters in Fire and Fury, and, clearly, two of Wolff’s key sources. In a recent interview on Australian TV, Wolff claimed to not be able to hear presenter Ben Fordham after Fordham asked Wolff if he could stand by his claims that Donald Trump was currently having an affair.

So who is telling the truth? Well, over the past few months Wolff has shifted the story along. What he writes in the book – that Blair was looking for a specific job as Middle East envoy – is a little different to what he told Marr: that Blair was "sucking up" to Jared Kushner and that Blair "is a complete liar" for denying he was looking for a job. What he told Marr is just a little different to what he told me, no specific mention of a job. Blair, meanwhile, has remained relatively consistent in his line. But he’s still been cultivating Jared Kushner and he’s still been going to meetings in the Trump White House away from the public eye, while at the same time continuing to hold himself up in the press as the level-headed, statesmanlike defender of liberal democracy.

Both men, it seems, have come to a version of events that they feel happy defending, a version of events that allows them to call each other liars. They have come, finally, to their own truth.

@oscarrickettnow