Tony Blair

Tony Blair: Three Landslides and One War

In his first six years in Downing Street, Tony Blair ordered British troops into combat five times - more than any prime minister in British history. The first four deployments, in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and then Afghanistan, were defended as vindications of a doctrine of liberal intervention. The fifth, Iraq in 2003, consumed the reputation the other four had built. No British politician of the modern era has held a larger electoral mandate, and none has seen it dismantled so completely by a single decision.

Fettes, Oxford and Ugly Rumours

He arrived on 6 May 1953 at the Queen Mary Maternity Home in Edinburgh, the second son of Leo Blair and Hazel Corscadden, with an elder brother, William, and a younger sister, Sarah. He was sent to the Chorister School in Durham, then boarded from thirteen at Fettes College in Edinburgh, and read jurisprudence at St John's College, Oxford, taking a second-class degree in 1975. Oxford produced two things that outlasted the law: a rock band called Ugly Rumours, in which he played guitar and sang, and a friendship with the Australian Anglican priest Peter Thomson, who pushed him simultaneously toward the political left and toward a Christian faith that stayed central to him.

He trained at the Inns of Court School of Law and took his pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, in chambers founded by Derry Irvine, who would become his first Lord Chancellor. There he met Cherie Booth, a fellow barrister, whom he married.

Sedgefield and the Fast Ascent

On 9 June 1983, at thirty, he was elected MP for Sedgefield in County Durham - one of the few Labour bright spots in a national catastrophe. His maiden speech on 6 July described him as a socialist who believed in cooperation rather than confrontation. The climb was quick: assistant Treasury spokesman under Roy Hattersley in 1984, shadow trade and industry spokesman in 1988, shadow home secretary under John Smith in 1992. When Smith died on 12 May 1994, Blair beat John Prescott and Margaret Beckett for the leadership.

Clause IV and New Labour

His first significant act as leader was to attack his own party's foundation document. At a special conference in April 1995 he replaced Clause IV, Labour's historic commitment to public ownership, with a statement defining the party as democratic socialist. It was a deliberate act of symbolic demolition, designed to make Labour electable to the aspirational middle-class voters who had backed Margaret Thatcher three times.

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It worked at a scale nobody had forecast. The 1997 election returned 418 Labour MPs and ended eighteen years of Conservative government. Blair entered Downing Street on 2 May 1997 aged forty-three, the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812 and the first born after the Second World War. He won again by a landslide in 2001 and a third time in 2005 with the majority cut from 167 to 66 - the first person ever to lead Labour to three consecutive general election victories, and the party's longest-serving prime minister.

The Domestic Record

The legislative output was substantial and much of it proved permanent. The Bank of England was given operational independence over monetary policy within days of taking office. Devolution created a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. The Human Rights Act brought the European Convention into British law. A National Minimum Wage arrived in 1998. NHS spending in England doubled in real terms to more than 100 billion pounds, public spending rose from 39.9 per cent of GDP to 48.1 per cent by 2010-11, and real incomes grew 18 per cent between 1997 and 2006. LGBTQ+ law was rewritten: an equal age of consent, the end of the ban on military service, the Civil Partnership Act and Gender Recognition Act of 2004, adoption rights.

He also introduced university tuition fees and pushed market mechanisms into health and education, both of which split his own side. He restructured the theatre of the job too, replacing two weekly fifteen-minute Prime Minister's Questions with a single half-hour Wednesday session, holding monthly press conferences, and giving evidence twice a year to the Liaison Committee. Critics called the overall effect presidential, arguing that Cabinet and Commons were consulted less than convention required, and the machinery of message discipline built around Alastair Campbell gave the era its defining pejorative: spin.

Belfast, Kosovo, Freetown

The Good Friday Agreement, announced on 10 April 1998 after days and nights of continuous negotiation, is the achievement even Blair's harshest critics concede. He was personally in the room for the final week alongside the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. It ended thirty years of conflict that had killed more than 3,500 people, established the consent principle keeping Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom for as long as its people choose, and brought in parties tied to paramilitary organisations. Reflecting on it twenty-five years later, Blair credited leaders "prepared even at personal political risk to face down the recalcitrant elements in their own parties and move forwards," and called it probably the only peace process in the modern world that really came to fruition. When the Omagh bomb went off on 15 August 1998, he went to County Tyrone.

In Kosovo in 1999 he pressed hardest of all NATO leaders for a ground offensive, offering 50,000 troops. In Sierra Leone in 2000, Operation Palliser reversed the collapse of the UN mission and Operation Barras rescued captured soldiers - the cleanest intervention of his premiership.

Iraq

Blair signed the Letter of the Eight on 30 January 2003 backing American policy, and wrote the foreword to the September Dossier asserting that Iraqi forces could deploy weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes. The weapons did not exist. One hundred and thirty-nine Labour MPs voted against the invasion and the largest demonstrations in modern British history opposed it. The death of the weapons scientist David Kelly produced the Hutton Inquiry; Campbell resigned on 29 August 2003. The Chilcot report, published on 6 July 2016, delivered a damning assessment of Blair's role. He had already conceded, in a CNN interview in October 2015, that there were elements of truth in the charge that the invasion helped produce ISIS, and apologised for mistakes, while declining to apologise for the war itself. In 2009 he had said he would have supported removing Saddam Hussein even had it been proved beforehand that no such weapons existed. Desmond Tutu, Harold Pinter and Arundhati Roy called for him to face the International Criminal Court; a private prosecution in 2017 failed because the crime of aggression is not part of English law. No case has reached trial, and defenders including the journalist John Rentoul and the barrister Geoffrey Robertson maintain that no law was broken.

Why Tony Is Called a Genius

Blair's claim rests on political technique rather than intellect, and the distinction matters. He took a party that had lost four consecutive elections, identified precisely which of its beliefs the electorate would not forgive, destroyed the most sacred of them in public, and converted the result into the three biggest mandates in Labour history. That is not merely charisma. It required an unusually cold ability to see his own tribe from outside, and an appetite for taking the personal risk of confronting it - the same quality he later praised in the Northern Irish leaders at Belfast, and the quality that made the Good Friday Agreement possible when it had defeated everyone before him. George Osborne, a political opponent, calls him "the master." Margaret Thatcher is said to have called him her greatest achievement, a compliment with a blade in it. David Cameron kept him on as an informal adviser.

The counter-case is that the same faculty was persuasion without judgement. Iraq was not a failure of communication but of assessment: he believed something untrue, made the case for it superbly, and was wrong. His approval ratings were the highest ever recorded in his first term and among the lowest afterwards, which suggests a politician who could move opinion but could not hold it once the underlying facts turned. Critics on the left add that the Clause IV triumph was a surrender dressed as a victory, moving Labour permanently rightward. Historians' rankings place him above average among British prime ministers rather than among the great. The fair summary is that Blair was a virtuoso of political persuasion whose gift was never matched by a comparable gift for knowing when he was mistaken.

Legacy

He announced his departure on 7 September 2006, confirmed it at Trimdon Labour Club on 10 May 2007, handed the leadership to Gordon Brown on 24 June and resigned as prime minister on 27 June, declining - uniquely among modern prime ministers - to issue any resignation honours. He became the Quartet's Middle East envoy the same day and served until May 2015. Since then he has built an unusually commercial post-political career: JPMorgan Chase, Tony Blair Associates, lecture fees reported at up to 250,000 dollars, advisory work for governments including Kazakhstan and Egypt that drew accusations of whitewashing, a fellowship at Yale, the memoir *A Journey* in 2010 whose 4.6 million pound advance and royalties he gave to the Royal British Legion, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, founded in December 2016. He was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 2022. The devolved parliaments, the minimum wage, the Human Rights Act and the Belfast settlement remain; so does Iraq.