The Tony Blair story

By Brian Wheeler
Political reporter, BBC News



Tony Blair has always stood out from the crowd.


At school he drove his teachers to distraction, constantly questioning their authority. At university, he acted out his rock star fantasies as the lead singer of a band.

Few at that stage would have predicted a career in the sober world of politics, even though Blair's charisma and ability to charm people were evident from an early age.


The story of his rise to power is certainly not a rags to riches tale - he was born with every advantage in life - but it is no less remarkable for that.
It is the story of how a middle class, privately-educated barrister - the son of a would-be Tory MP - went on to become the most successful leader in the history of the Labour Party, profoundly changing it and the country in the process.

And how a man once seen as a lightweight - preoccupied with his own image and popularity - became one of the most powerful and controversial figures on the world stage.

Tory leanings

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in 1953 in Edinburgh, the second son of Hazel and Leo Blair.

He spent the first few years of his life in Adelaide, Australia, where Leo lectured in law at the city's university.
They returned to the UK in late 1950s and Blair spent the remainder of his childhood in Durham, where he was a day pupil at the fee-paying Choristers School.

Leo was chairman of the local Conservative association but had to abandon his ambition to become a Tory MP when he suffered a stroke.
His political leanings appeared to have rubbed off on the young Tony, who stood in a mock school election as the Conservative candidate.

'Maddening'
Blair's teachers at exclusive Edinburgh boarding school Fettes recall a cheeky, rebellious figure; a talented actor who loved being the centre of attention and who cultivated a "cool" image among his peers.

"Tony was full of life. Maddening at times, full of himself and very argumentative," Blair's housemaster Eric Anderson told Blair's biographer John Rentoul.

"He was an expert at testing the rules to the limit, and I wouldn't swear that he stuck rigidly to the rules on not drinking, smoking or breaking bounds. But he was a live wire and fun to have around."
At the age of 17 he was given "six of the best" for persistently flouting the school rules. Then he was threatened with expulsion.

It was his girlfriend's father, Lord Mackenzie Stewart, an Old Fettesian and cross bench peer, who came to the rescue, striking a deal with the school that allowed Blair to spend the final few weeks of the summer term living with him.

Mackenzie Stewart's daughter, Amanda, was the first girl to be admitted to Fettes. Typically, it was the super-confident Blair who beat the 440 other boys to win her heart.

Rock music

Blair also met Charlie Falconer while at Fettes. The man who would later become his Lord Chancellor was a pupil at the rival Edinburgh Academy.
Blair left Fettes with three A levels and a place at St John's College, Oxford, to study law.

Like many teenage boys in the late 1960s he was besotted by rock music. He idolised Mick Jagger but he also dreamed of wielding power behind the scenes, as a manager or promoter.

Before taking up his place at Oxford, he headed for London, where he spent a carefree year "managing" student rock bands and putting on gigs and discos with his friend Alan Collenette.

To make ends meet, the pair stacked shelves at Barkers food hall, in Kensington.

At Oxford he briefly fronted a rock band, Ugly Rumours. Friends recall his charismatic stage presence, but also his professional attitude.

Trainee barrister

"He even wanted to rehearse," said band mate Mark Ellen.
But Blair was also developing a more thoughtful side. He began to talk about left wing politics and, unusually for the times, became increasingly serious about his Christian faith, taking confirmation classes.
He lost his mother to cancer while he was at Oxford, which also appears to have profoundly affected his outlook.

In his first year at the university, he befriended an Australian priest, Peter Thompson, with whom he would debate social issues and theology late into the night. Blair later credited Thompson with awakening in him an interest in Christian socialism, and a desire for social change.

Blair was also unusual, in the pot-smoking student milieu of the early 1970s, in that he appears to have avoided drugs. There are also few reports of him being incapacitated by drink.

His only real vice was smoking cigarettes, a habit wife Cherie later made him quit. He smoked his last one 15 minutes before their wedding.
Blair left Oxford with a second class degree and in 1976 became a trainee barrister in the chambers of Derry Irvine, who would later become his first Lord Chancellor.

It was here that he met Cherie Booth, a fellow pupil in Irvine's chambers. She had a first class degree and was seen as being more of a high flyer than Blair.

Activist

Friends recall a Christmas party, during a game which involved passing a balloon between their knees, when it became obvious they would be more than just colleagues.

"The next day we went out to lunch and hours later we were still there," Blair later recalled.

"I found her immensely physically attractive and I wanted her as a friend as well."

The couple married in 1980, setting up home in Hackney, east London, in a £40,000 end-of-terrace house, and threw themselves into local Labour Party politics.

Blair had joined the party shortly after leaving Oxford, but it was only now that he became more involved as an activist, encouraged by neighbour - and future home secretary - Charles Clarke, who shared his centre-left outlook.

In 1981, through his father-in-law, the actor and left wing campaigner Tony Booth, Blair contacted Labour MP Tom Pendry to ask for help in becoming an MP.

Pendry gave him a tour of the Commons and advised him to stand for selection as a candidate in a forthcoming by-election in Beaconsfield.
Blair never stood a chance in such a safe Conservative seat but he managed to attract the attention of Labour leader Michael Foot, who was impressed by his enthusiasm and told him he had a "big future in politics".

Manifesto concerns

Nevertheless, it looked as if he would miss out on a chance to contest the 1983 general election.
It was only at the very last minute that he found a vacant seat, in the newly-created constituency of Sedgefield, near where he grew up in County Durham, securing the nomination ahead of several sitting MPs and his future Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong, the daughter of a local Labour MP.
The 1983 Labour manifesto was one of the most left wing ever to be put before the British electorate. It included commitments to nationalisation of industry and unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Blair made it clear privately to John Burton, his election agent and mentor, that he did not agree with key parts of it, particularly proposals to withdraw Britain from the EU.

His victory, in a rock solid Labour area, was assured, although Labour had a bad night nationally.

The early 1980s was a grim era of factory closures and job losses in the North East of England, with unemployment in the former mining villages that made up most of Blair's constituency soaring above 20%.
Within weeks of entering Parliament, Blair, who at 30 was the youngest Labour MP, led a delegation of pit men and their families to London, where he joined forces with National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill to petition the National Coal Board over the planned closure of a coke works.

Middle class appeal
The young "London barrister," as local newspapers described him, fought for his constituents' jobs in traditional heavy industries but he also made no effort to hide his belief that the Labour Party had to modernise - and broaden its appeal to middle class voters - or die.
In an article for The Northern Echo, he argued "to win power for the low-paid, unemployed and the North, we must also appeal to the 60% of the population in private housing, to the employed on the average wage and to the South".

He soon learned this was not a message everyone in the Labour Party wanted to hear. At one party meeting, he was shocked to find himself being denounced as a "traitor to socialism" by Labour MP Dennis Skinner, after he made a speech urging reform.

"It was a very early lesson in politics because I said exactly what I thought. I said we were living in a new age but we were talking like everybody had just got black and white TVs," he later recalled in an interview with The Northern Echo.

Cherie had also contested the 1983 general election, but after losing the no-hope seat of Thanet in Kent, she threw herself into her legal career, going on to become one of the country's leading human rights lawyers.
By the end of Blair's first year in Parliament, she had also given birth to the first of the couple's four children, Euan.

That first year also saw Blair gain a crucial ally in his mission to modernise the Labour Party.

New agenda

Colleagues recall him being initially somewhat in awe of Gordon Brown, the young Scottish MP he shared an office with in Parliament.

BLAIR'S FAVOURITE FOOD

Unlike him, Brown had been steeped in Labour politics from a very early age and already had a knack for making headlines.
But together with Peter Mandelson, then a senior aide to party leader Neil Kinnock, the pair set about laying the foundations for what would become New Labour.

Blair, Brown and Mandelson were determined to make Labour electable again by ditching unpopular Labour policies, such as unilateral disarmament, and forging a new agenda marrying free market economics with social justice.
But they also wanted to improve the way Labour communicated with voters.

Focus groups, previously distrusted by Labour politicians - if they had even heard of such things at all - would became key tools in shaping the party's message.
Advertising executives and pollsters, previously treated with suspicion by left wing politicians, were drafted into the modernisers' inner circle to advise on presentation.

Leadership deal

Blair and Brown were promoted rapidly through the shadow cabinet ranks, but when it came to who would stand as the "modernising" candidate when leader John Smith died of a heart attack in 1994, their supporters were split. Many assumed Brown, as the older of the two, would take precedence.

But the shadow chancellor hesitated, eventually agreeing to give Blair a clear run at the top job.

The deal was supposedly struck over dinner at Granita, an Islington restaurant, with Blair reportedly pledging to hand over to Brown after two terms - and to give him, as chancellor, unprecedented control over the domestic agenda.

But the precise terms of any deal remain hotly contested.
What appears to have been decisive is the decision of Mandelson to switch his backing from Brown to Blair - believing the shadow home secretary to be the better communicator of the two.

It was a decision that caused a "rift" in New Labour from the beginning, Mandelson recently admitted, with the distrust and feuding between Blair and Brown, or more often their respective supporters, coming to dominate British politics.

Soundbites

The new Labour leader was initially seen as something of a political lightweight.

He had easily defeated left wingers John Prescott and Margaret Beckett to snatch the leadership - and he had set about reforming the party with single-minded determination - but he was dubbed "Bambi" by the press and cartoonists depicted him as a slick, permanently grinning public relations man.

Like many in the Labour Party, Blair believed Neil Kinnock's chances of becoming prime minister in 1992 had been destroyed by a hostile tabloid press.

He was determined not to let that happen to him and he hired tough talking former tabloid journalist Alastair Campbell to sharpen up its press operation.
The pair would obsess over every aspect of Blair's image, placing bets on which of their carefully crafted soundbites would make it on to the evening news bulletins. Campbell normally won.

Blair also courted showbusiness personalities - attempting to align Labour with a new wave of British pop stars and artists emerging in the mid 1990s, dubbed by the style press "cool Britannia".
His speeches at the time bordered on the messianic, tapping into what he saw as a pre-millennial mood of optimism.

Sleaze promise
His specific policies were modest in scope, but his rhetoric was dizzying: He promised nothing less than a country reborn, sweeping away the "sleaze" and drift of the Major years.

And he deployed all of his charm and charisma on TV chat shows, showing himself to be a natural in front of the cameras, in contrast to the more stilted Major.
It worked. Blair swept to a landslide victory in 1997, becoming, at 43, the youngest prime minister in nearly 200 years.


Always nervous on polling day, he was still gloomily contemplating a possible coalition with the Liberal Democrats, even as the scale of his victory was becoming obvious.

Two hours after polls closed - with the early results indicating a landslide - he ordered supporters in The Royal Festival Hall to stop celebrating for fear of appearing complacent or "triumphalist".

He need not have feared. Blair entered Downing Street on a wave of optimism and good will, on 2 May 1997.

He promised to restore trust in politics and breathe new life into Britain's tired institutions. In the early weeks of his premiership, he held a series of glittering receptions in Downing Street to celebrate his victory.
But behind the scenes, he was haunted by the splits and in-fighting he believed had destroyed previous Labour administrations.