Tony Blair

9 Key excerpts on "Tony Blair"

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  Rethinking Labour's Past

  • Nathan Yeowell(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  It is easy to see the post-Downing Street Blair, who flirted with Change UK, as being the ‘real’ ‘see, I told you so’ Blair. But the up-and-coming politician who derided Labour defectors to the SDP in the early 1980s was also Tony Blair. We need to read and reflect upon the whole of New Labour’s history – how its leaders interpreted the world, progressive politics and dilemmas at different moments in time. For Blair, that means including his days door-knocking with Michael Foot as a fresh-faced candidate; making waves in opposition as the (then junior) partner of Blair and Brown; and his time as a leader who thought and wrote on socialist ideology. It means reflecting on the prime minister who left the Conservative Party reeling – on the defensive regarding public spending and embarking upon its own ‘modernization’ – a politician who, with determination and energy, played a leading role in securing peace in Northern Ireland, and who robustly defended Britain’s role as a friend and partner to other European countries. And it means comprehending a leader – one who agonized so much over domestic reform – seemingly committed to a US president who, along with senior officials, oversaw the fiasco of the invasion of Iraq.

  The constants

  We have argued that Blair changed before, during and after his time in Downing Street and that any nuanced assessment of his legacy needs to take this into account. There is not one single Blair, and whatever ‘Blairism’ is, it means something different today than it did twenty years ago.

  But we also need to recognize that Blair’s time as Labour leader between 1994 and 2007 reflects, at times quite clearly, two other very clear political and economic contexts, which applied then but do not apply now: the ‘great moderation’ of the world (and British) economy in the 1990s and 2000s and the very personal, often dysfunctional, often devastatingly effective, relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown.

  ‘It’s the economy, stupid’

  Tony Blair was born, in Edinburgh, in 1953, and educated privately at Fettes College in Edinburgh. After a gap year in which he had tried his hand as a music promoter, he left London in 1972 to study Jurisprudence at Oxford where, slowly, he gravitated towards politics. This was the year after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and a year before the OPEC oil crisis: the two events which, with the benefit of hindsight, we now know marked the beginning of the end of the postwar boom. Blair graduated, went back to London and eventually joined the Labour Party in 1975. A year later, James Callaghan warned delegates to Labour’s conference in Blackpool that the country was facing an impending economic crisis.25

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  British Prime Ministers From Balfour to Brown

  • Robert Pearce, Graham Goodlad(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  19  Tony Blair (1953–) Prime Minister: May 1997–June 2007

  ‘I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy.’1

  Tony Blair in a BBC interview, 16 November 1997

  Tony Blair was the only Prime Minister to win three successive general elections for the Labour Party. His arrival in Downing Street in 1997, with a post-1945 record majority of 179 seats, brought to an end 18 years of Conservative rule and gave him a remarkable ascendancy in British politics. At 43 he was the youngest Prime Minister to take office since the Napoleonic Wars, exuding a dynamic sense of purpose which contrasted starkly with the aura of decline surrounding John Major’s outgoing administration. Although Blair’s majority was to slip to 167 in June 2001, and more seriously to 66 in May 2005, he retained office for a full ten years. He projected a self-consciously modern, informal image, associated with the spirit of ‘cool Britannia’ – shorthand for the government’s endorsement by various rock stars and show business personalities in the late 1990s. He brought with him an independent, professional wife and a young family, becoming the first Prime Minister in 150 years to father a child whilst in Number 10. Blair’s description of himself as ‘a pretty straight sort of guy’ was prompted by questions about his willingness to exempt Formula One from a ban on tobacco advertising after Bernie Ecclestone, the head of the motor racing organization, had made a sizeable donation to Labour Party funds. The remark was a typical and, in the short term, successful attempt to project himself as a trustworthy, accessible leader. He had an uncanny ability, at least in the early years, to express the public mood; his tribute to Princess Diana as ‘the people’s princess’,2

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  The Mighty And The Almighty

  How Political Leaders Do God

  • Nick Spencer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Tony Blair (1997 – 2007) ANDREW CONNELL

  INTRODUCTION

  T ony Blair became leader of the British Labour Party in 1994, and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. He won three successive general elections and became the longest-serving Labour Prime Minister in British history. However, for nearly a decade after 2007 his reputation lay very low, tainted by accusations of authoritarianism and of an excessive fondness for neo-liberalism, and by a long and messy war following his decision to join the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The purpose of this chapter is not to attempt to confirm or reappraise that reputation, but to explore the relationship of Blair’s Christian faith to his politics at home and abroad.

  In the public mind, Blair was probably more closely associated with Christianity than any Prime Minister since Gladstone. It was easy for cartoonists and satirists to draw on this association: every fortnight for ten years, he was lampooned in the satirical magazine Private Eye as the embarrassingly earnest and enthusiastic ‘Vicar of St Albion’s’. In one way this is strange and perhaps unfair, not only because Blair’s faith placed him among the great majority of post-war British Prime Ministers,1 but because for most of his political career he played down his religious beliefs. He did not hide them but with very few exceptions he did little to draw attention to them.

  This was a conscious decision which was, once Blair became leader of the opposition and then Prime Minister, strongly reinforced by the guidance of his press secretary, Alastair Campbell. Campbell firmly believed that British politicians who referred overtly to their personal faith were laying themselves open to wilful misrepresentation, and charges of sanctimony, from their opponents. When, at Easter 1996, Blair gave an extended interview about his faith to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper (see below), Campbell was furious: hostile commentators accused Blair of using religion for political ends and of trying to co-opt God for the Labour Party. Blair accepted Campbell’s verdict and for many years afterwards very seldom discussed his faith directly in public.2 As he would say in a speech delivered the year after his resignation, in Britain a politician’s admission of his or her faith opened up a range of unhelpful suppositions – that he or she was ‘weird’ and prone to make decisions on a basis of ‘the promptings of an inscrutable deity’ rather than reason, was seeking to impose faith on others, was pretending to be better than other people, and was seeking to ‘bestow a divine legitimacy’ on his or her politics.3 He did from time to time, as for example in his Millennium Speech in 1999, talk about the value of religion in more general terms,4 but even these references could be suspect. For example, in 2000 he accepted an invitation to deliver a speech at Tübingen University in the presence of the distinguished Catholic theologian Hans Küng: Campbell recorded in his diary his concern that the speech would be seen as ‘eccentric’ and noted that ‘on the plane [to Germany] we worked on the speech and I was trying to get the religion out and more politics in’.5 At the beginning of the Iraq War, when Blair wanted to end a television address with the words ‘God bless you’, he gave way to the protests of his advisors and instead concluded with a simple ‘thank you’.6

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  God In Number 10

  The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers, from Balfour to Blair

  • Mark Vickers(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SPCK Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Tony Blair (1997–2007)

  ‘Jesus was a moderniser’ Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in Edinburgh on 6 May 1953. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, and St John’s College, Oxford. Having graduated in law, he practised at the Bar. Blair fought the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election as the Labour candidate. In 1983 he was elected for Sedgefield, County Durham, a seat he held until his resignation in 2007.

  Blair was a modernizer, recognizing that Labour’s chances of re-election required significant changes in policy and presentation. Appointed to the Shadow Treasury team in 1984, he proved himself articulate, capable and a good media performer. He joined the Shadow Trade and Industry team in 1987, was appointed Shadow Energy Secretary in 1988 and Shadow Employment Secretary the following year. Shadow Home Secretary from 1992, his message, ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, resonated with the public.

  Following John Smith’s early death, Blair was elected Labour Party leader on 21 July 1994. He persuaded the party to amend its constitutional commitment to public ownership of the means of production. Under Blair, ‘New Labour’ ruled out a return to high taxation and nationalization. He appealed to the electorate’s legitimate aspirations for self-improvement while promising compassion for the poorest and those in need. He successfully wooed the City and the media. In contrast to the youthful Blair, Major’s Conservatives appeared tired, divided and immersed in sleaze. Labour won a landslide victory with a majority of 179 in the general election on 1 May 1997. The following day, Blair was appointed Prime Minister.

  The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, made a commitment to fiscal prudence and gave the Bank of England independence from the government. Blair had to manage the crisis that threatened the monarchy on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was felt to have captured the mood of the nation. His enthusiasm for constitutional reform might have been limited, but the consequences were significant: devolved assemblies for Scotland and Wales, an elected mayor and assembly for London. Foxhunting was outlawed and (most) hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords.

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  Reflections

  Conversations with Politicians Volume II

  • Peter Hennessy, Robert Shepherd(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Haus Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Tony Blair

  Series 5, Episode 1, first broadcast 10 August 2017

  Born 6 May 1953; Educated Fettes College; St John’s College, Oxford; Lincoln’s Inn

  MP (Labour) Sedgefield 1983–2007 Leader of the Labour Party, 1994–2007; Leader of the Opposition, 1994–97; First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister, 1997–2007

  Autobiography A Journey, 2010

  HENNESSY

  With me today is Tony Blair, a bedazzling politician who as Prime Minister for ten years with his energetic policies at home and abroad gave his name to an era. Like other Prime Ministers whose personality creates an aura and whose name acquires an ‘ism’, few people are neutral about him and his legacy, especially the Iraq War and its aftermath. Historians will linger long over the Blair years in Number 10 between 1997 and 2007, his policies, his style of government and his attempts to remake the centre-left of British politics almost from the moment he succeeded John Smith as leader of the Opposition in 1994. We’re meeting in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in central London.

  Tony, you were born in 1953 in Edinburgh. Tell me about your family.

  BLAIR

  My family was unusual in the sense my father was a foster child, who was brought up in a very poor part of Glasgow. In the 1930s he became Secretary of the Young Communists. He was virtually the only person I’ve ever come across who went off to serve in the war as a confirmed socialist and came out the other end as a Conservative in 1945. [Laughs]

  HENNESSY

  Unheard of.

  BLAIR

  Right, so. And my mother was from Irish stock, from Protestant southern Irish stock. So it was – they were both, although not originally from Scotland, brought up in Glasgow. That’s where they met, that’s where they married. And you know, my father was a fascinating man, a very brilliant man who would have been, I think, a very successful Conservative politician. He was due to stand for Parliament in the 1964 election, for what was a relatively safe Conservative seat and then tragically had a stroke at the age of 40 which finished his political career.

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  All In It Together

  England in the Early 21st Century

  • Alwyn Turner(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Profile Books

    (Publisher)

  In these fictional portrayals of prime ministers, there were common ingredients: the tensions between truth and lies, between principle and compromise, between Britain and America – and behind everything, the fact of war. This had become the dominant narrative of Tony Blair’s premiership even before he left office: that the honeyed words of hope had been drowned in a flood of falsehood, that he had sold out the interests of his own people, that behind his populism lurked an anti-democratic authoritarianism.

  None of this was particularly new. ‘Politicians have always been despised for hypocrisy and dishonesty,’ observed prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1925.60 Nonetheless, the sheer quantity of fiction during and immediately after Blair’s premiership suggested that there was something more here than simply the traditional British cynicism about politicians. There was no comparable treatment of, say, James Callaghan or John Major, while Gordon Brown got portrayed solely because he was standing next to Blair. Of post-war prime ministers, only Margaret Thatcher inspired so much work, and most of the dramatic depictions of her came after she left Downing Street. The story of Blair, however, exerted a deep pull on the national imagination from Iraq onwards.

  There was a difference. Thatcher was a divisive figure because her policies had such an impact on the lives of so many Britons; the same was not true of Blair, whose domestic policies were far less radical and far-reaching. In his case, it was the man, not the politics, that determined the perception.

  In the early months of his premiership, when there were allegations that Bernie Ecclestone’s donation to Labour had influenced government policy on cigarette sponsorship of Formula One, Blair had gone on television and asked to be judged on his character: ‘I think most people who have dealt with me think I’m a pretty straight guy, and I am.’61

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  What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?

  • Francis Beckett(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  8 I recalled that Dennis Potter wrote three years earlier:

  Each age, even each decade, has its little cant word coiled up inside real discourse like a tiny grub in the middle of an apple. Each age, even each decade, is overly impressed for a little while by half-way bright youngish men on the make who adeptly manipulate the current terminology …

  The little cant word of the nineties, he wrote, was modernisation.9

  *

  In a dreadfully sixties way, Tony Blair knew next door to nothing about the history and philosophy of the Party he led, often appearing to believe that it came into existence fully formed in 1994, when he became its leader. History, to the children of the sixties, was never much more than a burden.

  If Blair had known his party’s history, he probably could not have changed it so fundamentally. Roy Hattersley calls him

  the soldier who crossed a minefield in confident safety because he did not know that the mines were there. Because he neither knew nor cared about what Labour had once stood for, he was able to lead the most remarkable revolution in modern political history … The ideas which had inspired a century of democratic socialism were ruthlessly discredited. They had survived since Attlee’s day and were therefore, by definition, too ancient to be of any value in New Labour’s brave new world.10

  Labour before Blair was the party of the underdog. This, to the baby boomer generation, was a dreadfully old-fashioned thing to be.

  Some of his fiercest supporters had started by supporting Tony Benn, for in the Benn camp they found the intolerant certainty they craved. The more ideologically inclined, like Dr John Reid, were once intolerant and sectarian left-wingers. They had played the game of lefter-than-thou with ferocious abandon. It was an easy transition for them to become equally intolerant Blairites, for the Blairites, like the Bennites, police ideological purity strictly. New Labour is what Labour politicians of the baby boomer generation have bequeathed to the next generation.

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  Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005)

  • Matthias Matthijs(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6   Thatcherism’s flaws and Tony Blair’s consolidation (1987–2005)

  From the Lawson boom to New Labour’s “New Britain”

  The idea that a Labour government in 1992 would have been good for Britain is hardly worth even taking the trouble to dismiss. Our victory ensured that our reforms over the previous thirteen years were made permanent. After some turmoil, it locked into place a new economic regime. With it came the benefits of recovery without inflation, a tremendous strength for Britain. It protected the country from the folly of Labour’s grandiose spending plans, which would have meant either vast tax rises or the abandonment of all Labour had stood for on polling day. […] Above all, our victory in 1992 killed socialism in Britain. It also, I must conclude, made the world safe for Tony Blair. Our win meant that between 1992 and 1997 Labour had to change. No longer is Britain trapped in the old two-party tango, with one government neatly undoing everything its predecessor has created. Unquestionably, this is good for the country.

  John Major (1999)1

  I used the term “third way,” because you could say that there was a “first way” of traditional social democratic leftism, and there was a “second way,” which was the Thatcherite reaction to that. People were looking for a third alternative, which reconciles effective competition in a global marketplace with limiting inequality and a decent element of social solidarity. […] And this is not a “middle way” of any sort.

  Anthony Giddens (2006)2

  Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

  Gordon Brown (1994)3

  I have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideas. Without a powerful commitment to goals and values, governments are rudderless and ineffective, however large their majority. Furthermore, ideas need labels if they are to become popular and widely understood. The ‘Third Way’ is to my mind the best label for the new politics which the progressive centre-left is forging in Britain and beyond.

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  Half In, Half Out

  Prime Ministers on Europe

  • Andrew Adonis(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 11

  Tony Blair

  ANDREW ADONIS

  Tony Blair, Cherie Booth QC, Rupert Murdoch, Alastair Campbell. Lunch, 3 May 1997.’

  FIRST ENTRY IN THE VISITORS BOOK IN CHEQUERS AFTER TONY BLAIR’S ELECTION VICTORY

  I n my diaries there is this wonderful story Tony Blair told of President Chirac:

  Jacques told me how surprised he was that we had a homosexual in the Cabinet. He’d been reading about Chris Smith. ‘We couldn’t possibly do that in France,’ he said. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ve got four in my Cabinet.’ His jaw dropped. ‘Four? Four?’ he repeated. ‘Mon Dieu, dear Tony, and you can’t even join the euro!’

  Advancing gay rights was one of Tony Blair’s great achievements. By contrast, his support for the euro never came out of the closet and his greatest legacy on Europe is something which at the time of enlargement in 2004 he said would never happen: the migration to Britain of one and a half million Poles and other central and Eastern Europeans, which is one of the reasons why we may be leaving the European Union.

  My diaries contain two contemporary notes by Tony on his legacy written shortly before he left office in June 2007. In the first, he writes of ‘A nation open, at ease with globalisation, prepared to compete on its merits not its history.’ Of Britain’s international standing, he says, ‘We took Britain’s key alliances, Europe and America, and kept them both strong. In Europe, the UK went from the Beef War and isolation to leading the debates on European defence, economic reform, energy, enlargement, and did the Budget deal.’ In another note, he is more succinct: ‘On Europe, we have moved from the sidelines to the Centre. We have been prepared to defy Eurosceptic opinion to do so.’

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