At first glance, the event splashed across 18 pages of Hello! magazine could have been an influencer’s wedding. In one of the pictures, a small group, elegantly dressed all in white, gathered on the banks of the River Jordan, a splash of greenery in a stark, desert landscape. 

There was a brace of movie stars, a Queen (of Jordan), the daughter of the now US president, Ivanka Trump, with her husband Jared Kushner, and the couple who had organised the occasion – the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi Deng.

It was the kind of intimate billionaire gathering that, in 2010, was catnip for Hello! The photographer for the celebrity magazine captured the ceremony in which Deng and Murdoch’s two daughters were christened on the exact same spot where St John the Baptist had baptised Jesus Christ.

One guest, however, a godfather to the older child, hovered off to the side. A guest who was absent from every single one of the picture spreads: former prime minister Tony Blair. 

It was more than a year later, in an interview with Vogue, that Deng revealed Blair had been there. And although the photos have never been made public, a source confirms Blair’s presence throughout.

Deng remarked on how handsome Blair looked, the source said. “He looked like Jesus Christ. It was just these extraordinary images of Tony Blair in white robes in the River Jordan. I literally couldn’t believe it.”

It’s also the nickname that Blair has acquired among young political advisers who work for UK government ministers, a shorthand for the power and influence of Blair and his lavishly resourced thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute.

“You hear people all the time asking, ‘What will Jesus Christ say?’” said a former ministerial special adviser. “Jesus is a huge consideration in any policy announcement.” 

And there is a messianic quality to Blair. But in Britain, we tend to see him as a Life of Brian version of the messiah: a Pythonesque caricature, a target to be mocked, a very naughty boy.  

On the day after Trump announced a new “peace” plan for Gaza in which Blair will play a key role, the Nerve can reveal exclusive new information about his funding from key funders and allies of Israel, funders who are directly entwined with the IDF and the Israeli military machine. 

The friends and funders include – but are not limited to – Larry Ellison, the founder of the tech company Oracle, and a figure who until now has been largely ignored in America and almost completely in Britain. 

That needs to change. Because Ellison, 81, the second richest man in the world, is closely involved with the biggest financial, technological and political players in the world. 

He's a mentor to the only man who is richer than him, Elon Musk, and an investor in his companies. He’s a key partner of Sam Altman and OpenAI. He is now one of Trump’s closest allies and a personal friend and supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Ellison’s company, Oracle, is, according to Antony Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, “an integral part of the Israeli military”. It built Israel's first cloud services and its partner Rafael Systems is one of Israel’s biggest military companies. It makes the deadly spike missiles that are believed to have killed seven aid workers, including three Britons, in April 2024. It also built Israel's formidable Iron Dome. 

And Tony Blair is Larry Ellison’s representative on earth. He has given the former British prime minister’s institute – an institute that is advising governments, including Britain’s, around the world – almost half a billion dollars

This is a partnership that has been years in the making. And to understand Tony Blair and his power now in Israel and Gaza – and behind the scenes of the UK government – you have to understand Larry Ellison. 

In the US, where Ellison has mostly flown under the radar until now, people are waking up to his rapidly increasing power and influence. His son, David, is acquiring a vast new media empire in the US at rapid speed: Paramount and CBS News already, Warner Bros – which owns CNN and HBO – maybe next, with reports that Ellison will parachute a controversial pro-Israel journalist, Bari Weiss, into the top job at CBS.

Most consequentially of all, last week Ellison and his latest and newest business partner, Rupert Murdoch, sat in the oval office as Trump signed an executive order that would allow them and a group of other investors to own and control what is arguably the most influential social media platform in America: TikTok.

The global scale of what Blair and Ellison are doing has yet to be understood, in either Britain or America. It’s happening too fast. But at the centre are two of Ellison’s key friends and allies: Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu. While most of Silicon Valley was still leaning vaguely left, Ellison was one of the first tech moguls to throw his support and financial backing behind Trump. And he goes back much further with Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister has holidayed with him on his Hawaiian island (while Tony Blair vacationed on Ellison’s yacht). According to the Times of Israel, when Netanyahu was fighting corruption charges, Ellison intervened to find him a better lawyer.

And Britain is in the centre of it too. What you can see via the Blair-Ellison relationship, and why it warrants such close scrutiny, is a political and technological transatlantic alliance, an alliance that was formalised in the US-UK tech deal that was announced during Trump’s state visit to the UK earlier this month, including investment from Oracle.

That day on the banks of the River Jordan was not just a celebrity-billionaire mash-up. It was a chink of light into a skein of relationships that now need to be re-evaluated in the light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Not least because all three principals present that day - Murdoch, Blair and Kushner - are playing critical roles in the future fate of Gaza and Palestine. 

It was the mise en scène for events that are now playing out in plain sight. 

***

IT’S been a momentous month for Blair. Two of his pet projects that have been years – decades! – in the making, took a great leap forward: Keir Starmer announced a plan to introduce a digital identity card for all UK citizens, a foundational Blair policy that he first tried to introduce in the 90s and that his institute has pursued a long-term plan in pushing.

And, even more consequentially, on the same day sources told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Blair was a key part of Trump’s plan for Gaza.

This is the true root of Blair-as-Messiahdom. The goal of bringing peace to the Middle East is something that Blair has seen himself as uniquely positioned to enable. For years, he was the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, an alliance of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia. It has been an abiding obsession during his post-prime-ministerial career. 

And finally, it appeared he would be central to whatever happens next. Haaretz reported that Trump had endorsed a plan in which Blair would become the “governor of Gaza”. 

At the end of September Trump confirmed that plan. Blair would join an administration overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza in which the Palestinian Authority would have no involvement. Talking to the BBC, Dr Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and politician, described Blair’s appointment as “absolutely unacceptable”. 

It’s not just a question of Blair’s history in Iraq. Xavier Abu Eid, a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s diplomatic negotiating team, told the Guardian that “there is already suspicion of Tony Blair because of the Palestinian experience when he was the Quartet representative.”

But those suspicions are just the tip of the iceberg. The Nerve has established evidence that suggests Blair’s institute could be compromised in its relationships with key allies of Israel

Blair’s central involvement in Trump’s plan was masterminded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of the figures in white in the Hello! photographs - but it comes as there has been too little scrutiny of Blair's global influencing operation, his London-headquartered institute, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI).  

TBI is a vast organisation employing 900-plus employees operating in multiple countries. It’s not even clear what it is. A thinktank? A global consultancy? A lobbyshop? 

Most crucially, given his new appointment, there has been no meaningful attempt to examine the financial and other links between the man who is set to be the “governor of Gaza” and Israel. But those links are extensive.

We can report that in the published accounts of TBI’s finances is a reference to an organisation called the Kirsh Foundation. IN 2022, the foundation was listed as a “donor and funding partner” on TBI’s accounts. The person who established the foundation is South African businessman Natie Kirsh, who made his money via Magal Solutions, a company which has built major Israeli infrastructure, including the West Bank wall and much of the fence around Gaza.

In 2017, when Magal Solutions was touting to build Trump’s border wall, Netanyahu tweeted his encouragement at Trump: “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”

In the same year’s TBI accounts, Len Blavatnik’s foundation is also listed. Blavatnik, a businessman who is a hugely influential figure in the entertainment industry with a controlling stake in Warner Music, is also a prominent investor in both Israeli defence tech and media. He also bought Israel’s Channel 13 and brought in new leadership following a request from Netanyahu, who had complained to him it was too left-leaning. 

These are both significant revelations. The level of funding they have given Blair is not known, and the TBI did not respond to our questions. 

But they pale in the face of the influence of Ellison who has given or pledged between $476m and $538m to TBI. Blair is also centrally involved in his £1bn Ellison Institute for Technology in Oxford.

Staff members at TBI claim that these donations to the institution are “ringfenced” and do not influence policy. That’s a claim that seems preposterous given how crucial the money is to the institute’s finances - a vast chunk of its annual turnover of $145m - and how TBI’s reports include mentions of Oracle as a strategic partner. 

And what cannot be denied is that Ellison and Oracle are deeply entwined with the Israeli government, its occupation of Palestinian territories and now genocide in Gaza. Both Ellison and his longtime CEO, Safra Catz, have been abundantly clear that Oracle backs Netanyahu’s government and its actions in Gaza.  “Anyone who [has] a problem with that,” Catz said recently, has “a problem with us.” 

Ellison is the biggest ever donor to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and Catz – an Israeli citizen who stepped down as CEO last week but is now vice-chair of the board – has said: “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.” Last year, she was photographed with Netanyahu’s war cabinet, including the man in charge of IDF operations, Yoav Gallant.

 There was an extraordinary incident near the start of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza in which Oracle’s senior leadership praised its employees who volunteered their time to work with Israeli ministries to create “words of iron”. This was a software program that created an army of fake accounts to spread Israeli views across Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, specifically targeting public figures. 

But above all, Oracle’s technology is playing a critical role in the Israeli military’s tech stack. Antony Loewenstein – author of The Palestine Laboratory and an expert on Israel’s relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies and how they are using Gaza to test and train new technology products – calls Oracle's backing of Israel “both financial and ideological”.

He calls it an “integral” part of the Israeli military with the IDF using Oracle’s cloud services company and employees “training Israeli officials in how to use its cloud services”. 

Oracle did not respond to any questions or requests for comment. 

But it’s Ellison’s involvement in the deal to buy TikTok in the US that may be the biggest gamechanger of all. It’s the cherry on top of what has been an extraordinary media buy-up. His son, David, is leading a rapid charge to acquire US media properties. Earlier this summer, he bought Paramount for $8bn. As mentioned above, a deal to buy the Free Press is imminent.

And he’s now in talks to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which as well as bringing him huge franchises like Harry Potter would also give him CNN’s newsroom and HBO Studios.

But the biggest coup of all is Chinese-owned TikTok. Ellison has been pursuing this since at least 2020, and just as Kushner was Blair’s kingmaker for the role in Gaza, he’s also the one who’s smoothed Ellison’s path to this particular deal. 

It’s a move that China hawks in the US have long been pushing for, worried about the Chinese government’s influence and access to data. But it was the unfiltered, unmediated footage of heartbreaking carnage from inside Gaza that has become the overwhelming motivation behind the deal in the last two years. Tiktok has fuelled a generational shift in sentiment in the US, with younger news consumers overwhelmingly more sympathetic to Palestine than older ones. (Only 9% of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza compared to 49% aged 55-plus.)

And it’s another figure from those Hello! baptism photos who is helping Ellison close the deal, a fellow staunch defender of Israel and another close friend of Netanyahu: Rupert Murdoch. This week, with both Ellison and Murdoch present, Trump signed an executive order authorising the transfer of TikTok to US owners, announcing that he and China’s president, Xi Jinping, had come to an agreement. 

It was an arresting – and shocking – moment: America’s latest media monopolist, Ellison, partnering with its most famous, Murdoch. Between them and their sons, they will own a rightwing monopoly across the US media and now the licence to one of the most influential social media platforms in America, TikTok. It’s a huge upheaval with far-reaching consequences, a new hybrid media power merging mainstream and social media.

One man is in no doubt over the downstream consequences: Netanyahu. This weekend, he spoke to a room full of social media influencers. It was, he said, a hugely “consequential” deal for Israel, with TikTok a key “weapon” in its war.

“Weapons change all the time. You can't fight today with swords, that doesn't work very well, OK? … We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media.

“And the most important purchase that is going on right now is?” he asks the room. “Class? TikTok. Number one, number one. And I hope it goes through, because it can be consequential.” 

And then he tells them that the second most important platform is X. “So we have to talk to Elon [Musk]. He’s not an enemy. He’s a friend.” 

***

This article only scratches the surface of Tony Blair’s activities and those of his financial master, Larry Ellison. As the name on the steel and glass building in central London states, an institute for global change. And conveying the scope of it, the geopolitical stakes, the big-picture view, while trying to drill down into the details is almost impossible. 

The jokes about Tony Blair being Jesus Christ are funny. But they also reveal a deeper truth.

Ellison has successfully flown under the radar. But it’s his stealth that makes him dangerous, according to Gil Duran, a former political strategist and acerbic tech critic: “He is not trying to tweet his way to the front of human consciousness like Elon or others. But that is what makes him smarter and more dangerous.”

That and his ruthless determination and overweening belief in his own importance. Ellison’s biographer actually used a joke about that as the title for his book, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison. (The answer, he explains, is that God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.) 

If that is the case, is Blair, in whom he’s invested vast sums of money and time, Ellison’s Jesus Christ? 

Are they father, son, and – making up the trinity – the holy ghost in the machine, AI? I? AI and cloud services currently being used inside Israel's ministries and shortly here in Britain too. The UK government has signed a deal for Oracle to hold the private information of British citizens in a massive centralised database, a "sovereign AI cloud": a cornerstone of Tony Blair's other great obsession, digital IDs.

Culture, politics, technology. Larry Ellison is at the global centre of all three. But then in 2025 culture, politics and technology are one and the same, an accelerating convergence of which we are still only at the very beginning.