Tony Blair

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Education and legal career

Blair attended the Chorister School from 1961 to 1966, with his parents basing their family in Durham. He was sent to spend his school term-time boarding at Fettes College in Edinburgh from 1966 to 1971. Blair is said to have resentment over his time at Fettes. His teachers were unimpressed with him; his biographer, John Rentoul, said, "All the teachers I talked to said he was a complete pain in the backside, and they were thrilled to see the back of him." Blair is said to have modelled himself on Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones' lead singer. During his stay in Edinburgh, Charlie Falconer (a student at the rival Edinburgh Academy) was named lord chancellor.

Blair next spent a gap year in London trying to find fame as a rock music promoter after leaving Fettes College at the age of 18.

Blair matriculated at St John's College, Oxford, in 1972, studying Jurisprudence for three years. As a student, he performed guitar and drums with Ugly Rumours and performed some stand-up comedy, including parodying James T. Kirk as a character named Captain Kink. Peter Thomson, a fellow and Anglican priest who awakened his religious faith and left-wing politics, inspired him. Blair admitted that he was briefly a Trotskyist after reading the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky, which was described as "like a torch going on." He graduated from Oxford in 1975 with a second-class Honours B.A. Judisprudence is a branch of the United States.

Hazel died of thyroid cancer at the age of 52, which greatly affected him.

Blair became a member of Lincoln's Inn, Inn, and was promoted to the Bar as a pupil barrister after Oxford. At the chambers established by Derry Irvine (who was supposed to be Blair's first lord Chancellor), he met his future wife, Cherie Booth (daughter of actor Tony Booth).

Early political career

Blair left Oxford in 1975 and joined the Labour Party right away. In the early 1980s, he was active in Labour politics in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where he aligned himself with the party's "soft left." He ran for the Hackney council elections of 1982 in Queensbridge, a safe Labour constituency, but he was not chosen.

Blair was elected as the Labour Party candidate for Beaconsfield's safe Conservative seat in 1982, where a by-election was forthcoming. Despite Blair losing the Beaconsfield by-election and Labour's share of the vote dropped by ten percentage points, the party's leader remained popular. Despite his loss, William Russell, The Glasgow Herald's political reporter, described Blair as "a fantastic candidate," despite admitting that the result was "a disgrace" for the Labour Party. Blair, in contrast to his post-Communist philosophy, 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 characterized himself on the left. Blair, like Tony Benn, thought "Labour right" was bankrupt: "Socialism must eventually appeal to the people's better minds." If you are contaminated overmuch as in a political period, you cannot do that." Nevertheless, he dismissed the hard left as no worse offender, saying, "he saw the hard left as no better."

Blair had not been selected as a candidate anywhere in the run-up to a general election. He was invited to stand again in Beaconsfield and was initially eager to accept, but Derry Irvine's chambers leader advised him to find somewhere else that might be winnable. The situation was complicated by Labour's legal challenge against planned boundary changes, and candidates were chosen based on previous boundaries. When the legal challenge fell, the party had to rerun all selections on the new boundaries; most were based on existing positions, but in County Durham, a new Sedgefield constituency had been constructed out of Labour-voting areas that had no obvious predecessor seat.

The Sedgefield first round of voting did not begin until after the 1983 general election was called. Blair's initial reports revealed that the left was attempting to select Les Huckfield, a sitting MP for Nuneaton who was attempting elsewhere; many sitting MPs were also interested in it due to boundary changes. Blair traveled to Trimdon and gained the trust of the branch secretary John Burton, who had not yet been nominated by the branch, and with Burton's assistance, the branch was unveiled. He was added to the shortlist and selected over Huckfield at the last minute and retained the selection over Huckfield. It was Labour's last candidate pick before the election, and was made after Labour's (Labour's Election Who's Who" released biographies of all its candidates.

John Burton, Blair's election agent and one of his most trusted and longest-serving allies, he became Blair's election agent and one of his most trusted allies. Blair's election literature in the 1983 general election supported left-wing policies that Labour endorsed in the 1980s. He called for Britain to leave the EEC as early as the 1970s, but he had informed his selection committee that he personally supports continuing membership and voted "Yes" in the 1975 referendum. In 1986, he opposed the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) but by 1989, he supported the ERM. Despite never promoting unilateral nuclear disarmament, he was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Blair was aided on the campaign by soap opera actress Pat Phoenix, his father-in-law's niece. Despite the party's landslide defeat at the general election, he was elected MP for Sedgefield in 1983 at the age of thirty.

Blair said in his first speech to the House of Commons on July 6, 1983, "I am a socialist not because of reading a textbook that has captured my intellectual curiosity, nor in the absence of unthinking tradition." I argue that socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both practical and moral. It stands for cooperation, not confrontation; for friendship, not fear. It stands for equality.

Blair's political ascension began immediately after being elected. In 1984, he was appointed as the assistant Treasury spokesman in his first front-bench position. He appeared on BBC's Question Time in 1985, arguing that the Conservative Government's Public Order White Paper was a danger to civil rights.

Blair also requested an inquiry into the Bank of England's decision to rescue the defunct Johnson Matthey bank in October 1985. By this point, Blair was aligned with the party's reforming tendencies (led by leader Neil Kinnock) and was promoted from the Shadow Trade and Industry team as a spokesman on the City of London after the 1987 election.

In 1987, he ran for office to the Shadow Cabinet after receiving 71 percent. Blair became shadow home secretary under John Smith after Kinnock resigned following his fourth straight Conservative win in the 1992 general election. According to Smith's leadership, the old guard argued that trends indicated that they were regaining traction under Smith's leadership. Meanwhile, the breakaway SDP faction had merged with the Liberal Party, and the new Liberal Democrats appeared to pose a serious threat to Labour's support. Blair, the modernizing faction's leader, had a completely different outlook, saying that the long-term trends had to be changed. The Labour Party was too locked into a base that was devolving, based on the working-class, labor unions, and residents of subsidised council housing. The rapidly growing middle-class, particularly the more affluent working-class families, was largely ignored. They aspired to middle-class status but accepted the Conservative argument that Labour was holding dynamic people back with its levelling-down policies. Labour voters began to see Labour in opposition terms regarding higher taxes and higher interest rates. The steps toward what would become New Labour were not strictly necessary but it was going to be. With limited input from Blair), John Smith (with limited input from Blair) brought an end to the trade union block vote for Westminster candidates at the 1993 conference. But Blair and the modernizers wished Smith to move forward, calling for a radical change of Party priorities by scraping "Clause IV" from the historic pledge to nationalization of industry. In 1995, this would have been achieved.

John Smith died as a result of a heart attack in 1994. Blair defeated John Prescott and Margaret Beckett in the ensuing leadership race and became Opposition Leader Tony Blair. Blair was appointed a Privy Councillor, as per tradition for the holder of that office.

Blair unveiled a new set of goals and values during his keynote address at the 1994 Labour Party Conference, which was widely believed to refer to the party's abolishal of Clause IV of the party's constitution. This resulted in the demise of the party's stated pledge to "the common ownership of the means of production and exchange," which was largely understood to mean wholesale nationalization of major industries. The clause was replaced by a statement that the party is "democratic socialist," according to Blair, who also claimed to be a "democratic socialist" himself in the same year. However, Labour's departure from nationalisation as a result of the party's transition to "New Labour."

He inherited the Labour leadership at a time when the Conservative party was on the rise in opinion polls over the Conservatives, after the Conservative government's image in monetary policy had been tarnished by the Black Wednesday economic disaster of September 1992. Despite continuing economic growth and falls in jobs that the Conservative government (led by John Major) had inherited since the 1990-1992 recession, Blair's election as leader saw Labour support rise even more. Blair said at the 1996 Labour Party conference that his three top priorities on his first term included "education, education, and education."

"New Labour" won a landslide victory in 1997 general elections, ending eighteen years of Conservative rule since 1906, aided by John Major's unpopularity (itself deeply divided over the European Union).

According to diaries distributed by Paddy Ashdown, during Smith's leadership of the Labour Party, there were talks with Ashdown about forming a coalition government in the case of a hung parliament. Blair, according to Ashdown, was a promoter of proportional representation (PR). If a Labour-Lib Dem coalition were formed, Menzies Campbell and Alan Beith were earmarked for positions in the cabinet in place of Ashdown, Liberal Democrat MPs Menzies Campbell and Alan Beith. Because John Prescott and Gordon Brown opposed the PR system, Blair was compelled to reconsider these plans, and many members of the Shadow Cabinet were worried about concessions being made against the Lib Dems. Almost every opinion poll since late-1992 put Labour ahead of the total majority.

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