Blair

By Mick Temple

Biography of the last British Prime Minister of the 20th Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781912208388

Book preview

The 20 British Prime Ministers

of the 20th century

Blair

MICK TEMPLE

HAUS PUBLISHING • LONDON

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Haus Publishing Limited

26 Cadogan Court

Draycott Avenue

London SW3 3BX

www.hauspublishing.co.uk

Copyright © Mick Temple, 2006

The moral right of the author has been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-904950-73-6

Designed by BrillDesign

Typeset in Garamond 3 by MacGuru Ltd

[e-mail]

Printed and bound by Graphicom, Vicenza Front cover: John Holder

CONDITIONS OF SALE

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Introduction

Part One: THE LIFE

Chapter 1: Tony Blair’s Childhood

Chapter 2: Oxford, the Bar and Cherie

Chapter 3: Tony Blair, Fledgling Politician

Chapter 4: The Road to the Leadership

Part Two: THE LEADERSHIP

Chapter 5: Blair’s First Term: an Opportunity Lost

Chapter 6: In the Court of King Anthony

Chapter 7: ‘Gordon and Tony were lovers …’

Chapter 8: International Statesman

Chapter 9: Religion and Family

Chapter 10: Iraq and the War on Terror

Part Three: THE LEGACY

Chapter 11: 2005 and Beyond; an Assessment

Chapter 12: His Place in History?

Notes

Chronology

Further Reading

Picture Sources

Index

Introduction

No British politician has entered prime ministerial office riding the wave of goodwill and public optimism upon which Tony Blair swept into Downing Street. In 1997, an ineffective and decidedly uncharismatic Conservative government had limped along until the last possible moment before calling an election. John Major’s Cabinet had lost the party its reputation for economic competence; his Chancellor could jokingly remark, ‘je ne regrette rien’, after losing more than £10 billion of our money. ‘Sleaze’ dominated the political agenda. Cash in brown envelopes for asking parliamentary questions, marital infidelity and kinky sex with everyone and everything from rent boys to schoolgirls, inappropriate directorships and shady dealings all smacked of pigs at the trough. Overall, the Conservative government gave an impression of being out of touch with popular feeling and decidedly ‘yesterday’s men’.

A government of largely old and grey men seemed out of place, survivors of an ancient regime, in the new ‘Cool Britannia’ of the 1990s, where British groups like the Stone Roses, Blur and Oasis were once again setting new pathways for popular music and hot young British fashion designers were evoking memories of the Swinging Sixties. Thatcherism and its central tenet of market ideology as the solution for all problems no longer captured the mood of what appeared to be a more caring and consensual political environment. The nation wanted something younger, fresher and cleaner, and Tony Blair and New Labour appeared to encapsulate all the needs of a ‘New Britain’. Britain was a country that did not want to return to the strife-ridden pre-Thatcherite days of the 1970s, with states of national emergency, three-day weeks and endless strikes. We wanted a more caring and supportive environment for those at the bottom of society than ‘care in the community’ but without a return to the nanny state and over-powerful trade unions. Tony Blair promised to deliver it.

This brief biography of Blair cannot claim to be authoritative – but neither can any of his biographies. They are either tainted by too close co-operation with their subject, generally hostile to Blair or essentially speculative. The high degree of secrecy (for a public figure) which Blair has successfully erected around both his private life and the decision-making process at the centre of government also makes accurate assessment difficult for the moment. Assessing the relevance of any living person is fraught with difficulty, especially when that person is a political leader still in office. When Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990 the critical consensus was that many of her major reforms were essentially minor or would soon be reversed. It took a decade for the weight and permanence of her achievements to be realised and even now both respect and the laws of libel restrain her biographers.

His lifelong friend and colleague Anji Hunter doubts that any book can do justice to Tony; ‘no one can evaluate him properly’ she has declared, and for the moment she is probably right.¹ Any definitive biography of a public figure has to wait until he or she is dead. History may come to a very different judgement on Tony Blair than this slim volume. Whether or not history will regard him as a great man, he is clearly a very important figure in Britain’s political history. My purpose here is to outline some of the key events of this public yet very private man’s life and attempt a critical appraisal of his achievements. Hopefully, readers will be interested enough to read more in-depth accounts of the life and politics of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Part One

THE LIFE

Chapter 1: Tony Blair’s Childhood

All his biographers have commented upon Tony Blair’s desire for secrecy in both his public and private life. Elements of his family background may be an important contributory factor in this concern. At first glance, Tony Blair appears to have been born into an ordinary middle-class family, one perhaps relatively privileged by the standards of the time, but apparently representing certain solid values of family and religion. His father Leo Blair, a former army officer, had trained as a lawyer and when Tony was born had a post as a law lecturer at Edinburgh University. Leo’s Conservative Party membership further supports the picture of an almost stereotypically conventional middle-class family, albeit one where the father had ambitions to become an MP. Behind this normality, the reality is more exotic.

Tony Blair bears a remarkable physical resemblance to his mother. His emotional closeness to her was considerable; she was the rock of his early life and her strong religious conviction was passed on to him. Perhaps crucially for her son’s development, she did not wholly share her husband Leo’s centre-right views. Hazel Blair is the key to Tony Blair’s core beliefs. She was born Hazel Corscaden in 1923 in Bally-shannon, County Donegal, Ireland, into a devout Protestant family. Her father died when she was just six months old and her mother married a Ballyshannon man, William McLay. The family moved to Glasgow where Hazel’s stepfather became a successful butcher. From what little we know, her home life was happy and stable. She left school at 14; despite possessing a quick intelligence (as well as an occasionally hot temper) her education was limited, not unusual for women then. When war broke out she joined the Navy as a Wren, visiting Australia in the course of duty. The war over, she went to work as a typist at the Ministry of National Insurance in Glasgow where she was eventually to meet Tony’s father.

Leo Blair was born in 1923, the illegitimate son of two touring variety actors. His mother, Celia Ridgeway, was already married, although she was later divorced by her husband for her adultery and married Leo’s father Charles Parsons in 1926. Charles’ stage name was Jimmy Lynton; Leo was later to adopt Charles and Lynton as his own middle names and his two sons were to be christened William James Lynton and Anthony Charles Lynton. Celia and Charles asked Mary and James Blair, who had become friends during shows in Glasgow, if they could look after baby Leo until they were able to give him a greater degree of stability. Information is sketchy about his natural parents’ subsequent contact with their son, although when they later tried to remove the 13-year-old Leo from his foster parents, Mary threatened to commit suicide if he left.¹ Leo stayed, and assumed for many years that his natural parents had subsequently lost interest in his life.² As Anthony Seldon has noted, it is impossible to gauge the precise effect of such emotional turmoil upon Leo, but a sense of abandonment and rejection was to affect him all his life. In fact, they had written many times to him but Mary had first hidden and later burned the cards and letters. She eventually wrote to Celia and Charles telling them he was missing, killed in action, and his parents died never knowing the truth.³

Such a cruel act by an essentially kind and decent woman, who adored Leo and was adored by him in turn, can only be explained by his status in her life. After two miscarriages she had been unable to bear children and Leo was an unexpected blessing. Her husband James, a shipyard rigger (when work was available in the harsh realities of the 1930s Depression) was frequently ill and died young. Leo was the centre of her life and to lose him would have been more than she could bear. She gave him everything, encouraging and supporting him in his wish to better himself. He showed his debt to his foster parents a few months before his marriage to Hazel, when he changed his name by deed poll from Parsons to Blair.

While he was given great love and support, Leo’s upbringing was harsh. Tenement living in Govan bred toughness and left-wing politics were the norm. His foster mother was a staunch Communist and Leo imbibed the language of Marxist-Leninist ideology. He went to work for the party newspaper the Daily Worker when he left school. He was an active Communist Party member and, intelligent and blessed with considerable organisational ability, he began to think seriously about a career in politics. His wartime experiences, as with many other servicemen, were to radically change his politics, but Leo went in the opposite direction ideologically to most of his compatriots. He began the war as a private but in the ‘people’s war’ class barriers were being broken down. He was commissioned and found to his surprise that he enjoyed the company of the officers’ mess. His foster mother had instilled in him a desire for self-improvement and his discovery that men on the other side of the class war were far from the demons he had been told they were weakened his faith in Communism and convinced him that Conservative ideology made a lot of sense. He had no desire to spend his life in a tenement block sharing an outside toilet with other families. Although he voted Labour in 1945, by 1947 he had joined the Conservative Party.

Intelligent and motivated, upon discharge from the army as a second lieutenant he began studying part-time for a law degree at Edinburgh University while working full-time for the Inland Revenue. He met Hazel and they fell in love. Upon qualification he began working at the university as a law lecturer, a considerable indication of his intellectual abilities; he must have made a very favourable impression upon his own tutors. He taught himself to play the piano, singing popular songs well to his own accompaniment, and friends and acquaintances found him charming and amusing company. In 1948 he married Hazel and their wedding picture shows an attractive and personable looking couple. For Jon Sopel, Leo Blair was a ‘walking advertisement for social mobility’.⁴

Despite some biographers’ assertions of a strong, often authoritarian father, Tony speaks of him with clear affection, while acknowledging that for the first 11 years of Tony’s life his father’s political and business interests made him a relatively remote figure. What veteran Labour parliamentarian Leo Abse described as a ‘house of secrets’ may be at the core of Blair’s personality. Abse’s entertaining (if highly speculative) psychological examination of Blair supports the sense of both father and son as outsiders. Abse alleges that the spectre of Celia, whom he calls judgementally Tony Blair’s ‘promiscuous grandmother’, hung over

Reviews for Blair

[macdad-236140 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Despite having resigned as prime minister in 2007, Tony Blair remains a controversial figure. Now out of office, his legacy is in the hands of historians and biographers, and if Mick Temple offers any portents, their judgments will be harsh. Written as Blair's premiership was coming to an end, Temple's biography offers an early assessment of what Blair accomplished - and what he didn't - during his time at Downing Street.

Temple begins by focusing on Blair's early years. Here the women assume considerable prominence, beginning with Blair's mother, Hazel. Temple sees her as essential to understanding Blair's basic values and her death as the catalyst for his political career. Key to this career is Blair's wife Cherie, whose personal and political partnership is viewed by Temple as the bedrock of his life. Though the more devoted Labour Party member, she set her political aspirations aside after he won election to Parliament in 1983, helping him instead as he began his meteoric rise from the ranks to assume the leadership of the party barely a decade later.

Blair's success was due to a combination of charm and aggressive campaigning after the unexpected death of John Smith in 1994. The aura of optimism and change he projected also proved key three years later in his triumph over an exhausted Conservative Party. This aura dissipated as the image of 'New Labour' soon became tarnished by scandal, yet Temple ultimately places the blame for the unfulfilled expectations squarely on Blair's shoulders. In the end, he argues, it is Blair himself who, like his predecessor Harold Wilson, failed to follow through on the promises of change and left little more than a legacy of sleaze and disappointment.

Overall, Temple's biography of Blair provides a concise assessment of his subject's life and legacy. Though lacking original research, he makes good use of media coverage and the previously published literature on Blair and his government to assess the man and his achievements. Blairites will find little comfort within its pages, but the picture that emerges of a prime minister who failed to live up to his promise is likely to outlast the best achievements of his spin-doctors.