ANTHONY CHARLES LYNTON BLAIR
PRIME MINISTER
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May
1953Edinburgh) is a British Labor Party politician who
served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from
1997 to 2007. The former leader of the British Labor Party,
the 73rd Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997 to
2007).
The record holder of the British Labor Party on the
length of stay at the head of the party. He was the
Member of Parliament for Sedge field from 1983 to
2007 and Leader of the Labor Party from 1994 to
2007. Blair led Labor to a landslide victory in the
1997 general election, winning 418 seats, the most
the party has ever held. The party went on to win
two more elections under his leadership, in 2001 and
2005, with a significantly reduced majority in the
latter
A N T H O N Y C H A R L E S LY N TO N B L A I R
Blair was elected Labor Party leader in the leadership
election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his
predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party
used the phrase "New Labor" to distance it from previous
Labor policies. Blair declared opposition to the traditional
conception of socialism, and declared support for a new
conception that he referred to as "social-ism", involving
politics that recognized individuals as socially
interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, equal
worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity.
He was succeeded as Leader of the Labor Party on 24
June 2007 and as Prime Minister on 27 June 2007 by
Gordon Brown. On the day he resigned as Prime Minister,
he was appointed the official Envoy of the Quartet on the
Middle East. In May 2008, Blair launched his Tony Blair
Faith Foundation. This was followed in July 2009 by the
launching of the Faith and Globalization Initiative with Yale
University in the US, Durham University in the UK and the
National University of Singapore in Asia to deliver a
postgraduate programme in partnership with the Foundation.
Foreign policy: Blair forged friendships with several
conservative European leaders, including Silvio Berlusconi
of Italy, Angela Merkel of Germany and more recently
Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
Blair became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 2 May 1997, serving
concurrently as First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and
Leader of the Labor Party. The 43-year old Blair became the youngest person to
become Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool became Prime Minister at the age of
42 in 1812. With victories in 1997, 2001, and 2005, Blair was the Labor Party's
longest-serving prime minister, the only person to lead the party to three
consecutive general election victories. In the first years of the New Labor
government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto
pledges, introducing the National Minimum Wage Act, Human Rights Act and
Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish
Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Blair's role as Prime Minister was particularly visible in foreign and
security policy, including in Northern Ireland, where he was involved in
the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. From the start of the War on Terror in
2001, Blair strongly supported the foreign policy of US President George
W. Bush, notably by participating in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and
2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair is the Labor Party's longest-serving Prime
Minister, the only person to have led the Labor Party to more than two
consecutive general election victories, and the only Labor Prime Minister
to serve consecutive terms more than one of which was at least four years
long.
EARLY LIFEBlair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 May 1953, the second son of
Leo and Hazel Blair (née Corscadden). Leo Blair, the illegitimate son of two
English actors, had been adopted as a baby by 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 but
returned to (and later died in) Ballyshannon in 1923, where his wife, Sarah
Margaret (née Lipsett), gave birth to Blair's mother, Hazel, above her family's
grocery shop.
Blair has one elder brother, Sir William Blair, a High Court judge, and a
younger sister, Sarah. Blair spent the first 19 months of his life at the family
home in Paisley Terrace in the Willow brae area of Edinburgh. During this
period, his father worked as a junior tax inspector whilst also studying for a law
degree from the University of Edinburgh. In the 1950s, his family spent three
and a half years in Adelaide, Australia, where his father was a lecturer in law at
the University of Adelaide. The Blair’s lived close to the university, in the
suburb of Dulwich. The family returned to the UK in the late 1950s, living for a
time with Hazel Blair's stepfather, William McClay, and her mother at their
home in Stepps, near Glasgow. He spent the remainder of his childhood in
Durham, England, where his father Leo lectured at Durham University.
EDUCATION
After attending The Chorister School in Durham from
1961 to 1966, Blair boarded at Fettes College, a prestigious
independent school in Edinburgh, during which time he met
Charlie Falconer (a pupil at the rival Edinburgh Academy),
whom he later appointed Lord Chancellor. While studying at
the school classmate of the future prime minister was the
actor Rowan Atkinson
After Fettes, Blair spent a year in London, where
he attempted to find fame as a rock music promoter
before reading jurisprudence at St John's College,
Oxford. As a student, he played guitar and sang in a
rock band called Ugly Rumours
He was influenced by fellow student and Anglican priest Peter
Thomson, who awakened within Blair a deep concern for religious faith
and left-wing politics. While Blair was at Oxford, his mother Hazel died
of cancer, which greatly affected him. After graduating from Oxford in
1975 with a Second-Class Honors B.A. in Jurisprudence, Blair became
a member of Lincoln's Inn, enrolled as a pupil barrister, and met his
future wife, Cherie Booth (daughter of the actor Tony Booth) at the law
chambers founded by Derry Irvine (who was to be Blair's first Lord
Chancellor), 11 King's Bench Walk Chambers.
PERSONAL LIFEFAMILY, RELIGIOUS FAITH
Blair married Cherie Booth, a Roman Catholic and future Queen's Counsel, on 29 March 1980.
They have four children: Euan, Nicholas, Kathryn, and Leo. Leo, delivered by the Royal
Surgeon/Gynecologist Marcus Setchell, was the first legitimate child born to a serving Prime Minister
in over 150 years—since Francis Russell was born to Lord John Russell on 11 July 1849. Blair was
criticized when it was discovered that one child had received private tuition from staff at Westminster
School. All four children have Irish passports, by virtue of Blair's mother, Hazel Elizabeth Rosaleen
Corscaden (1923-1975).
The family's primary residence is in Connaught Square Religious faith. Blair has the Christian faith.
Blair often read the Bible before taking any important decisions. He says that "I was brought up as [a
Christian], but I was not in any real sense a practising one until I went to Oxford. There was an
Australian priest at the same college as me who got me interested again.
CHARITY
On 14 November 2007, Blair launched the Tony Blair
Sports Foundation, which aims to "increase childhood
participation in sports activities, especially in the North East
of England, where a larger proportion of children are
socially excluded, and to promote overall health and prevent
childhood obesity." On 30 May 2008, Blair launched the
Tony Blair Faith Foundation as a vehicle for encouraging
different faiths to join together in promoting respect and
understanding, as well as working to tackle poverty. "The
Foundation will use its profile and resources to encourage
people of faith to work together more closely to tackle
global poverty and conflict," says its mission statement.
Blair has established Tony Blair Associates to "allow him to
provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on a
commercial and pro bono [free] basis, on political and
economic trends and governmental reform".The profits from
the firm go towards supporting Blair's "work on faith, Africa
and climate change". In February 2009, he applied to set up
a charity called the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative:
the application was approved in November 2009.
EARLY POLITICAL CAREER
Blair joined the Labor Party shortly after graduating from
Oxford in 1975. During the early 1980s, he was involved in
Labor politics in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where he
aligned himself with the "soft left" of the party. In 1982
Blair was selected as the Labor candidate in the safe
Conservative seat of Beaconsfield, where there was a
forthcoming by-election. Although Blair lost the
Beaconsfield by-election (the only election he lost in his 25-
year political career) and he lost 10% of the vote, he
acquired a profile within the party. In contrast to his later
centrism, Blair made it clear in a letter he wrote to Labor
leader Michael Foot in July 1982 that he had "come to
Socialism through Marxism" and considered himself on the
left. The letter was eventually published in June 2006.
In 1983, Blair found the newly created constituency of
Sedge field, a notionally safe Labor seat near where he had
grown up in Durham. The branch had not made a
nomination, and Blair visited them. Several sitting MPs
displaced by boundary changes were interested in securing
selection to fight the seat. With the crucial support of John
Burton, Blair won their endorsement; at the last minute, he
was added to the short list and won the selection over Les
Huckfield. Burton later became Blair's election agent and
one of his most trusted and longest-standing allies.
Blair's election literature in the 1983 UK general election
endorsed left-wing policies that Labor advocated in the early
1980s. He called for Britain to leave the EEC, though he had
told his selection conference that he personally favoured
continuing membership. He also supported unilateral
nuclear disarmament as a member of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament. Blair was helped on the campaign
trail by soap opera actress Pat Phoenix, his father-in-law's
girlfriend. Blair was elected as MP for Sedge field despite
the party's landslide defeat in 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." The Labor Party is declared in its constitution to
be a democratic socialist party rather than a social
democratic party; Blair himself organized this declaration of
Labor to be a socialist party when he dealt with the change
to the party's Clause IV in their constitution.
Once elected, Blair's political ascent was rapid. He
received his first front-bench appointment in 1984 as
assistant Treasury spokesman. In May 1985, he appeared on
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 and embarrassed the government by
finding an EEC report critical of British economic policy
that had been countersigned by a member of the
Conservative government. By this time, Blair was aligned
with the reforming tendencies in the party (headed by leader
Neil Kinnock) and was promoted after the 1987 election to
the shadow Trade and Industry team as spokesman on the
City of London.
In 1987, he stood for election to the Shadow Cabinet,
receiving 71 votes. When Kinnock resigned after a
Conservative landslide in the 1992 election, Blair became
Shadow Home Secretary under John Smith.
EVENTS BEFORE RESIGNATION
As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was
accused of misleading Parliament, and his popularity
dropped dramatically. Labor party's overall majority in the
2005 general election was reduced to 66. As a combined
result of the Blair-Brown pact, Iraq war and low approval
ratings, pressure built up within the Labor party for Blair to
resign. On 7 September 2006, Blair publicly stated he would
step down as party leader by the time of the Trades Union
Congress (TUC) conference held 10–13 September 2007,
having promised to serve a full term during the previous
general election campaign. On 10 May 2007, during a
speech at the Trim don Labor Club; Blair announced his
intention to resign as Labor Party leader and Prime Minister.
At a special party conference in Manchester on 24 June 2007, he formally
handed over the leadership of the Labor Party to Gordon Brown, who had
been Chancellor of the Exchequer. Blair tendered his resignation on 27 June
2007 and Brown assumed office the same afternoon. Blair also resigned his
seat in the House of Commons in the traditional form of accepting the
Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, to which he was appointed by
Gordon Brown in one of the latter's last acts as Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The resulting Sedge field by-election was won by Labors’
candidate, Phil Wilson. Blair decided not to issue a list of Resignation
Honors, making him the first Prime Minister of the modern era not to do so.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED
STATES
Along with enjoying a close relationship with Bill Clinton, Blair formed
a strong political alliance with George W. Bush, particularly in the area of
foreign policy. Bush lauded Blair and the UK. The alliance between Bush
and Blair seriously damaged Blair's standing in the eyes of many British
people. Blair argued it is in Britain's interest to "protect and strengthen the
bond" with the United States regardless of who is in the White House.
However, a perception of one-sided compromising personal and political
closeness led to serious discussion.
POST-PRIME MINISTERIAL
CAREERDIPLOMACY
On 27 June 2007, Blair officially resigned as Prime
Minister after ten years in office, and he was officially
confirmed as Middle East envoy for the United Nations,
European Union, United States, and Russia. Blair originally
indicated that he would retain his parliamentary seat after
his resignation as Prime Minister came into effect; however,
on being confirmed for the Middle East role he resigned
from the Commons by taking up an office of profit.
President George W. Bush had preliminary talks with Blair
to ask him to take up the envoy role. White House sources
stated that "both Israel and the Palestinians had signed up to
the proposal». In May 2008, Blair announced a new plan for
peace and for Palestinian rights, based heavily on the ideas
of the Peace Valley plan.
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