The UK foreign office kept no minutes of a 4 December meeting between Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and Tony Blair about the Middle East, even though the discussion took place as Blair was pushing Donald Trump’s plan for a so-called Board of Peace for Gaza.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told Middle East Eye that no minutes were recorded for the meeting. It also said it had no records of briefing materials prepared for Cooper and no correspondence tied to the planning of the meeting.
The missing paper trail matters because Blair was not meeting Cooper as a private citizen with no active role in the region. Trump named him as a founding member of the Board of Peace in September 2025, and Blair was confirmed in January. The board gives Trump extensive powers over Gaza, with Trump serving as chairman for life. It has no Palestinian representatives on its executive committee.
That context helps explain why the meeting is drawing attention now. Internal EU meeting minutes obtained by Follow the Money in February said lobbyists from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change urged the EU to join the Board of Peace on 15 December, showing that Blair’s circle was still pressing the project days after his conversation with Cooper. So far, 28 countries have joined the board, including Benjamin Netanyahu, while the UK said in January that it would not take part.
Cooper set out the government’s position on 22 January, saying Britain would not be one of the signatories because the treaty raised broader legal issues. She also said the UK had concerns about Vladimir Putin being part of something talking about peace while there were still no signs of a commitment to peace in Ukraine. On 8 March, she added that it was important to learn lessons from what went wrong in Iraq and that all decisions needed to be about what was right for British citizens.
The silence around the 4 December meeting also sits uneasily beside Blair’s record in the region. He led the UK into the 2003 Iraq war alongside the US, and he has faced renewed scrutiny over the involvement of staff members at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in a previous Gaza plan dubbed the Gaza Riviera. Those plans were widely condemned as appearing to condone ethnic cleansing of the territory’s Palestinian population.
Chris Doyle said Blair should be respected less because of his record in the Middle East, arguing that he has spent so much time working on the issue that some policymakers still treat him with a level of deference that ignores the broader record. The lack of minutes, briefing materials and related correspondence will only sharpen questions about how the meeting was handled and what role Blair’s peace-board diplomacy played behind closed doors.
