Tony Blair
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007, and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He was Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997 and held shadow cabinet posts from 1987 to 1994. Blair was Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007. He is the second-longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history after Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving Labour politician to have held the office, and the only person to lead Labour to three consecutive general election victories. Blair founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in 2016, and serves as its Executive Chairman.
Blair attended the independent school Fettes College, studied law at St John's College, Oxford, and worked as a barrister. He became involved in the Labour Party and was elected to the House of Commons in 1983 for Sedgefield. Blair supported moving Labour to the political centre of British politics. He was appointed to Neil Kinnock's shadow cabinet in 1988 and shadow home secretary by John Smith in 1992. Following Smith's death in 1994, Blair won the Labour leadership election. Blair rebranded the party as "New Labour". Blair became the youngest prime minister of the 20th century after Labour won a landslide of 418 seats in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years in opposition. It was the first Labour victory in 23 years.
During his first term, Blair enacted constitutional reforms and increased public spending on healthcare and education, while introducing market-based reforms in these areas. Blair introduced a minimum wage, tuition fees for higher education, constitutional reform such as devolution in Scotland and Wales, expansion of UK LGBT+ rights, and significant progress in the Northern Ireland peace process with the landmark Good Friday Agreement. Blair oversaw interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000, which were successful.
Blair won a second term after another landslide victory in 2001. His second term was shaped by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, resulting in the war on terror. Blair supported the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration by ensuring British Armed Forces participated in the War in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and capture Osama bin Laden. Blair supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had British Forces participate in the Iraq War, on the false beliefs Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and developed ties with al-Qaeda. The invasion was controversial; it attracted widespread opposition and 139 of Blair's MPs opposed it. As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was accused of misleading Parliament, and his popularity dropped.
Blair won a third term after Labour won again in 2005, but with a reduced majority. Blair pushed more public sector reform and brokered a settlement to restore powersharing in Northern Ireland. By spring 2006 he faced significant difficulties, including failures by the Home Office to deport illegal immigrants. Amid the Cash-for-Honours scandal, Blair was interviewed three times as prime minister, as a witness and not under caution. In 2006, Blair announced he would resign within a year. He resigned the party leadership and as prime minister in June 2007, and was succeeded by Gordon Brown, his chancellor.
Blair gave up his seat and was appointed special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, until 2015. He has been chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change since 2016, made political interventions, and been an influence on Keir Starmer. In 2009, Blair was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. Blair has been among the most popular and unpopular politicians in British history. As prime minister, he achieved the highest recorded approval ratings in his first term, but one of the lowest after the Iraq War. The 2016 Iraq Inquiry report gave a damning assessment of Blair's role in the Iraq War. Blair is rated as above average in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers.
Early years
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born on 6 May 1953 at Queen Mary Maternity Home in Lauriston, Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair. Leo Blair was the illegitimate son of two entertainers and was adopted as a baby by the Glasgow shipyard worker James Blair and his wife, Mary. Hazel Corscadden was the daughter of George Corscadden, a butcher and Orangeman who moved to Glasgow in 1916. In 1923, he returned to Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in Ireland. In Ballyshannon, Corscadden's wife, Sarah Margaret, gave birth above the family's grocery shop to Blair's mother, Hazel.Blair has an elder brother, William, and a younger sister, Sarah. Blair's first home was with his family at Paisley Terrace in the Willowbrae area of Edinburgh. During this period, his father worked as a junior tax inspector whilst studying for a law degree from the University of Edinburgh.
Blair's first relocation was when he was nineteen months old. At the end of 1954, Blair's parents and their two sons moved from Paisley Terrace to Adelaide, South Australia. His father lectured in law at the University of Adelaide. In Australia, Blair's sister, Sarah, was born. The Blairs lived in the suburb of Dulwich close to the university. The family returned to the United Kingdom in mid-1958. They lived for a time with Hazel's mother and stepfather at their home in Stepps on the outskirts of north-east Glasgow. Blair's father accepted a job as a lecturer at Durham University, and moved the family to Durham when Blair was five. It was the beginning of a long association Blair was to have with Durham.
Since childhood, Blair has been a fan of Newcastle United Football Club.
Education and legal career
With his parents basing their family in Durham, Blair attended the Chorister School from 1961 to 1966. Aged 13, he was sent to boarding at Fettes College in Edinburgh from 1966 to 1971. According to Blair, he hated his time at Fettes. His teachers were unimpressed with him; his biographer, John Rentoul, reported that "ll the teachers I spoke to when researching the book said he was a complete pain in the backside and they were very glad to see the back of him." Blair reportedly modelled himself on Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Leaving Fettes College at the age of 18, Blair next spent a gap year in London working as a rock music promoter.In 1972, at the age of 19, Blair matriculated at St John's College, Oxford, reading jurisprudence for three years. As a student, he played guitar and sang in a rock band called Ugly Rumours, and performed stand-up comedy. He was influenced by fellow student and Anglican priest Peter Thomson, who awakened his religious faith and left-wing politics. While at Oxford, Blair has stated that he was briefly a Trotskyist, after reading the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky, which was "like a light going on". He graduated from Oxford at the age of 22 in 1975 with a second-class Honours B.A. in jurisprudence.
In 1975, while Blair was at Oxford, his mother Hazel died aged 52 of thyroid cancer, which greatly affected him. After Oxford, Blair trained at the Inns of Court School of Law, later part of The City Law School and served his barrister pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, where he was called to the Bar. He met his future wife, Cherie Booth, at the chambers founded by Derry Irvine, who was to be Blair's first lord chancellor.
Early political career
Blair joined the Labour Party shortly after graduating from Oxford in 1975. In the early 1980s, he was involved in Labour politics in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where he aligned himself with the "soft left" of the party. He stood as a candidate for the Hackney council elections of 1982 in Queensbridge ward, a safe Labour area, but was not selected.In 1982, Blair was selected as the Labour Party candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Beaconsfield, where there was a forthcoming by-election. Although Blair lost the Beaconsfield by-election and Labour's share of the vote fell by ten percentage points, he acquired a profile within the party. Despite his defeat, William Russell, political correspondent for The Glasgow Herald, described Blair as "a very good candidate", while acknowledging that the result was "a disaster" for the Labour Party. In contrast to his later centrism, Blair made it clear in a letter he wrote to Labour leader Michael Foot in July 1982 that he had "come to Socialism through Marxism" and considered himself on the left. Like Tony Benn, Blair believed that the "Labour right" was bankrupt, saying "ocialism ultimately must appeal to the better minds of the people. You cannot do that if you are tainted overmuch with a pragmatic period in power." Yet, he saw the hard left as no better, saying:
With a general election due, Blair had not been selected as a candidate anywhere. He was invited to stand again in Beaconsfield, and was initially inclined to agree but was advised by his head of chambers Derry Irvine to find somewhere else which might be winnable. The situation was complicated by the fact that Labour was fighting a legal action against planned boundary changes, and had selected candidates on the basis of previous boundaries. When the legal challenge failed, the party had to rerun all selections on the new boundaries; most were based on existing seats, but unusually in County Durham a new Sedgefield constituency had been created out of Labour-voting areas which had no obvious predecessor seat.
The selection for Sedgefield did not begin until after the 1983 general election was called. Blair's initial inquiries discovered that the left was trying to arrange the selection for Les Huckfield, sitting MP for Nuneaton, who was trying elsewhere; several sitting MPs displaced by boundary changes were also interested in it. When he discovered the Trimdon branch had not yet made a nomination, Blair visited them and won the support of the branch secretary John Burton, and with Burton's help was nominated by the branch. At the last minute, he was added to the shortlist and won the selection over Huckfield. It was the last candidate selection made by Labour before the election, and was made after the Labour Party had issued biographies of all its candidates.
John Burton became Blair's election agent and one of his most trusted and longest-standing allies. Blair's election literature in the 1983 general election endorsed left-wing policies that Labour advocated in the early 1980s. He called for Britain to leave the EEC as early as the 1970s, though he had told his selection conference that he personally favoured continuing membership and voted "Yes" in the 1975 referendum on the subject. He opposed the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1986 but supported the ERM by 1989. He was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, despite never strongly being in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Blair was helped on the campaign trail by soap opera actress Pat Phoenix, his father-in-law's girlfriend. At the age of thirty, he was elected as MP for Sedgefield in 1983; despite the party's landslide defeat at the general election.
In his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 6 July 1983, Blair stated, "I am a socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for cooperation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality."
Once elected, Blair's political ascent was rapid. Neil Kinnock appointed him in 1984 as assistant Treasury spokesman under Roy Hattersley who was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In May 1985, he appeared on the BBC's Question Time, arguing that the Conservative Government's Public Order White Paper was a threat to civil liberties.
Blair demanded an inquiry into the Bank of England's decision to rescue the collapsed Johnson Matthey bank in October 1985. By this time, Blair was aligned with the reforming tendencies in the party and in 1988 was promoted to the shadow Trade and Industry team as spokesman on the City of London.