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Tony Blair

“Look…in a very real sense…I'm a pretty straight sort of guy, you know?”

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1997-2007 and the first Labour PM since Jim Callaghan lost the 1979 election. First elected to Parliament in 1983, Blair abandoned his socialist roots to argue for Labour moving to the centre. He became Labour leader on the death of John Smith in 1994, swiftly reforming the party to eliminate the nationalising Clause 4 and other left-wing trappings. The party was elected in the largest landslide since Clement Attlee's in 1997, defeating John Major's Tories and sending them to the political wilderness for more than a decade.

Just as Churchill accepted the postwar socialist consensus of Attlee, Blair accepted the new capitalist consensus put in place by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, but added more of a social democratic slant to it. His oratory was idiosyncratic but straightforward and appealed to the people, in particular his statement on the death of former princess Diana in 1997. His early slogans, now often mockingly repeated, included “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” and “we have three priorities: education, education, education”. Blair was a great manipulator of the media with the assistance of his foul-mouthed Scottish sidekick Alistair Campbell, skilfully deflecting any bad news with new initiatives and forcing the press to move on to other matters. He also kept the Tories from regrouping by simply appropriating any of their more popular policies for himself (a strategy eventually countered by David Cameron's tactic of simply not having any policies to steal).

Blairaq

However much of Blair's ministry was dominated by his unpopular alignment with George W Bush and in particular Britain's controversial participation in the 2003 Iraq War. His use of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as justification for war led to the nickname “Bliar” when it transpired that these did not, in fact, exist.

The Blair-Brown rivalry

Gordon Brown allegedly agreed to support Tony Blair's leadership bid in 1994 in exchange for becoming Chancellor with considerable powers, and succeeding him as PM. This is known as the Granita Deal. For the entirety of Blair's ministry, the press speculated on when Brown would make his bid to become PM and the two's squabbling over responsibilities. Given Blair's media-savviness, however, it seems possible that this was deliberately played up, as it led to the press considering the matter of who ran the country as one of court intrigue - Blair or Brown - and simply ignoring the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. This was particularly noticeable in the 2005 election, which Blair convincingly won despite his association with the Iraq war.

Blair finally stood down in 2007 after just over ten years in power. His fall is thought to have been orchestrated by several Brownite MPs, but given his past record it seems possible that Blair did it because he knew financial crisis was just around the corner. Love him or hate him, Tony Blair was (and is) a true Magnificent Bastard.

In fiction

His full name is Anthony Charles Lynton Blair; a “Charles Lynton” appeared as leader of fascist Britain in Harry Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies. He also sometimes appears in Eurowank timelines as President of a federal European Union, a post which he is apparently still in the running for.

offtopic/tony_blair.txt · Last modified: 2019/03/29 15:13 by 127.0.0.1

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