It is that the firmest language in the dossier was put under the name of Mr Blair himself namely, that the threat posed by Iraq was "serious and current", contrary to his own chief of staff's advice against describing the threat as "imminent".Mr Blair, in other words, went out on a limb, by comparison even with his close aides.
Swedes, it seems, have the world's firmest handshakes, and Pakistanis the limpest.
Many saw the speech as the firmest statement yet of the principles behind his policy towards intervention abroad.
Whatever the legal basis for the move, it was politically short-sighted: Georgia's closest allies within the EU, such as Poland and the Baltic countries, are also Mr Saakashvili's firmest supporters.The path towards Europe remains full of pitfalls.
For two big reasons, that is an outcome to be welcomed.The vote comes after a decade of rule by Carlos Menem, a rumbustious Peronist who turned into one of Latin America's firmest free-market reformers.
The firmest point was that the FARC agreed to restart peace talks, and at a faster pace.
This month's vote will also continue the transformation of a country of 5.5m people into a parliamentary republic unprecedented in Central Asia, where a presidential strongmen have run the show for decades with the firmest of hands.Kyrgyzstan is voting a year and a half after the overthrow of its previous leader, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, in a popular movement in April 2010.
One might look even further back: many of the Netherlands' firmest critics of religion belong to the country's strong Humanist movement, which traces its roots to the atheistic or pan-theistic philosophy of that greatest apostate of Amsterdam's Jewish community, Baruch Spinoza.
Still, one of her firmest principles over the past two years has been an insistence that she would not negotiate over the presidency, but would hold out until she could have it on her own terms.
Some of the government's firmest promises have not been kept.
It will take at least a year for it to do a thorough, therapeutic job.In 2003 one of the firmest grounds for thinking Saddam was up to no good was that he acted guilty, even when the invasion was on his doorstep.
