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Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield. He is also known to be a Freemason due to his close relationship with President Bush.

He has been leader of the Labour Party since July 1994, following the death of John Smith in May 1994. Blair led Labour to power with a landslide victory in the 1997 general election replacing John Major as Prime Minister and ending 18 years of Conservative government. He is the Labour Party's longest-serving Prime Minister, and the only person to have led the party to three consecutive general election victories. The youngest person to be appointed Prime Minister since 1812, he has deployed British armed forces into four conflicts: in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Along with Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, Blair is credited with moving the Labour Party towards the centre of British politics, using the term "New Labour" to distinguish his policies of support for the market economy from the party's older policy of nationalisation. He has referred to his policy as "modern social democracy" and "the third way" - a development partly supported by the reform socialist thinktank, the Fabian Society, of which Blair is a member (in common with the vast majority of Labour MPs). Supporters on the left feel that Blair places insufficient emphasis on traditional Labour priorities such as the redistribution of wealth and investment in public services. Although Blair has tended not to make any issue of his faith, some have commented on his religious position as high church Anglo-Catholic; in a 2006 interview he said he considered himself ultimately accountable to God for his actions, particularly his decisions to commit UK troops to military action .

Since the 11th September attacks on New York and Washington, Blair's political agenda has been dominated by international affairs, especially with the United States–led "War on Terror". He has controversially supported some aspects of US President George W. Bush's foreign policy, including sending British troops to participate in Afghanistan since 2001, and in Iraq since 2003; Blair's related anti-terrorism legislation has also been controversial.

In October 2004, Blair declared his intention to seek a third term but not a fourth. The Labour party won a third term in government at the 2005 general election for the first time in its history, although its majority in the House of Commons was reduced to 66. The fall in Labour's share of the vote renewed speculation as to how long his leadership would continue. On 14 May 2006, the Independent on Sunday reported that Blair had privately assured ministers that he would step down in the summer of 2007. It is widely predicted that he will be succeeded by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown at some point before the next General Election, to be held by 3 June 2010.

Family background

Blair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair (née Corscadden). Leo Blair was the illegitimate son of two English actors, Charles Parsons and Mary Augusta Ridgway Bridson, whilst Hazel Corscadden's family were Protestants from County Donegal, Ireland. He has one elder brother, William Blair, who is a QC.

Blair spent his early childhood in Adelaide, Australia, where his father was a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Adelaide. The Blairs lived close to the university in the inner-eastern suburb of Dulwich.

Blair spent the remainder of his childhood years in Durham, England, his father being by then a law lecturer at Durham University. After attending Durham's Chorister School, Blair was educated at Fettes College, a fee-paying school in Edinburgh (sometimes called the "Eton of Scotland"), where he met Charlie Falconer, whom he later appointed as Lord Chancellor. Blair's biographer John Rentoul reported that "All the teachers I spoke to ... said he was a complete pain in the backside, and they were very glad to see the back of him." After Fettes, he read law at St John's College, Oxford. During his college years he also played guitar and sang for a rock band called Ugly Rumours. After graduating from Oxford with a second class degree (Oxford did not divide the second class into 2:1 and 2:2 until later), Blair enrolled as a pupil barrister and met his future wife, Cherie Booth, at the Chambers of Derry Irvine, who was to be the first Lord Chancellor appointed by Blair. Biographer Rentoul also records that according to Blair's lawyer friends, the future PM voiced much less concern regarding party affiliation than to his aim of becoming PM.

Blair married Booth, a practising Roman Catholic (and future Queen's Counsel), on 29 March, 1980. They have three sons (Euan, Nicky, and Leo) and one daughter (Kathryn). Leo (born 20 May 2000) 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. Leo was the centre of a debate over the MMR vaccine when Blair, citing his family's right to privacy, refused to say whether or not his son had received the triple MMR vaccine or single inoculations. As is usual in what Roman Catholics would term a "mixed marriage", their children are being brought up as Catholics. Blair has attended Mass with his family every Sunday, and has been seen attending Mass at Westminster Cathedral alone. In April 2006, it was revealed that Father Michael Seed conducts a private mass in 10 Downing Street for the whole family. Blair once expressed a desire to take Roman Catholic communion, but was advised by Basil Cardinal Hume that the Eucharist is reserved for baptised Catholics. Blair has the closest ties of any British Prime Minister to the Roman Catholic Church.

Euan and Nicky attended the London Oratory School in Fulham where they could be educated in accordance with the Catholic faith of their mother. When this decision was announced, Blair was criticised for rejecting schools in Islington, where he then lived. These schools included a Catholic boys' school. Euan Blair received widespread publicity after police found him "drunk and incapable" in Leicester Square, London, while out celebrating the end of his GCSE exams in July 2000, shortly after his father had proposed on-the-spot fines for drunken and yobbish behaviour. While the Blairs have stated that they wish to shield their children from the media, they have not always been able, or willing, to do so. Blair has twice lodged complaints about press stories concerning his children. However, the fact that the family have occasionally held photo calls together has led some (including former leader of the Conservative Party Iain Duncan Smith) to accuse him of exploitation , and such photographs have been used on Private Eye covers. After leaving the University of Bristol, Euan obtained a position as an intern for the U.S. House Committee on Rules under David Dreier, a Republican Congressman.

Early political career

Shortly after graduation in 1975, Blair joined the Labour Party. During the early 1980s, he was involved in the Labour Party in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where he aligned himself with the "soft left" who appeared to be taking control of the party. However, his attempt to secure selection as a candidate for Hackney Borough Council was unsuccessful. Through his father-in-law he contacted Tom Pendry, a Labour MP, to ask for help in how to start his Parliamentary career; Pendry gave him a tour of the House of Commons and advised him to run for selection in a by-election due to be held in the safe Conservative seat of Beaconsfield, following the death of the sitting MP Ronald Bell in 1982, and where Pendry knew a senior member of the local party. Blair was chosen as the candidate; he won only 10% of the vote and lost his deposit, and the seat was retained comfortably by Tim Smith for the Tories, but he impressed the then Labour Party leader Michael Foot and got his name noticed within the party. At the time Blair was closely associated with the soft left current in the party centred on the Labour Co-ordinating Committee and espoused (for the time) conventional leftist positions. A July 1982 letter to Foot, eventually published in the New Statesman (reprinted in The Daily Telegraph) gives an impression of Blair's outlook at this time.

In 1983, Blair found that the newly created seat of Sedgefield, near where he had grown up in Durham, had no Labour candidate. Several sitting MPs displaced by boundary changes were interested. He found a branch that had not made a nomination and arranged to visit them; coincidentally, the European Cup Winners' Cup final involving Aberdeen FC was happening that night and Blair settled down to watch it with five senior members of the local party before discussing his potential candidacy. With the crucial support of John Burton he won their endorsement; at the last minute he was added to the shortlist and won the selection over displaced sitting MP Les Huckfield. Burton later became his agent and one of his most trusted and longest-standing allies.

Blair's election literature stressed the Labour Party's policies which included opposition to British membership of the EEC, despite having told the selection conference that he personally favoured continuing membership. He also, more enthusiastically, supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, being a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the time. The seat was safely Labour despite the party's collapse in the 1983 UK general election; Blair was helped on the campaign trail by soap actress Pat Phoenix, the girlfriend of his father-in-law Anthony Booth.

Blair stated in the House of Commons on 6 July 1983: "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 Labour Party is declared in its constitution to be a Democratic Socialist party , not a social democratic party - Blair himself organised this declaration of Labour to be a socialist party when he dealt with the change to the party's Clause IV in their constitution.

In opposition

Once elected, Blair's ascent was rapid, and he received his first shadow position in 1984 as assistant Treasury spokesman. He 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 a European Economic Community report critical of British economic policy that had been countersigned by a member of the Conservative government. Blair was firmly aligned with the reforming tendencies in the party, headed by leader Neil Kinnock, and was promoted after the 1987 election to the Trade and Industry team as spokesman on the City of London. He laid down a marker for the future by running for the Shadow Cabinet in 1987, obtaining 77 votes. This was considered a good showing for a newcomer.

The stock market crash of October 1987 raised the prominence of Blair, who inveighed against the 'morally dubious' City whiz-kids as being incompetent. He signalled his modernising stance by protesting against the third-class service for small investors at the London Stock Exchange. Blair entered the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy in 1988, and the next year became Shadow Employment Secretary. In this post he realised that the Labour Party's support for the emerging European 'Social Charter' policies on employment law meant dropping the party's traditional support for closed shop arrangements, whereby employers required all their employees to be members of a trade union. He announced this change in December 1989, outraging the left-wing of the Labour Party but making it more difficult for the Conservatives to attack.

As a young and telegenic Shadow Cabinet member, Blair was given prominence by the party's Director of Communications Peter Mandelson. However his first major platform speech at the Labour Party conference in October 1990 was a disastrous embarrassment when he spoke too fast and lost his place in his notes. He worked to produce a more moderate and electable party in the run-up to the 1992 general election, in which he had responsibility for developing the minimum wage policy that was expected to be strongly attacked by the Conservatives. During the election campaign Blair had a notable confrontation with the owner of a children's nursery, who was adamant that the policy would cost jobs.

When Kinnock resigned after the defeat by John Major in the 1992 UK general election, Blair became Shadow Home Secretary under new leader John Smith. Blair defined his policy (in a phrase that had actually been coined by his current Chancellor Gordon Brown) as "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". This had been an area in which the Labour Party had been weak and Blair moved to strengthen its image. He accepted that the prison population might have to rise, and bemoaned the loss of a sense of community, which he was prepared to blame (at least partly) on '1960s liberalism'. However, Blair spoke in support of equalisation of the age of consent for gay sex and opposed capital punishment.

Smith died suddenly in 1994 of a heart attack. Both Blair and Gordon Brown had been considered as possible leadership contenders and had always agreed that they would not fight each other. Brown had previously been thought the most senior and understood this to mean that Blair would give way to him; however, it soon became apparent that Blair now had greater support. A MORI opinion poll published in the Sunday Times on 15 May found that among the general public, Blair had the support of 32%, John Prescott, 19%, Margaret Beckett 14%, Gordon Brown 9%, and Robin Cook 5%. At the Granita restaurant in Islington on 31 May, Brown agreed to give way. There is no conclusive evidence of the terms of any wider "Granita Pact" but supporters of Brown maintain that Blair undertook to resign as Prime Minister after a set period in favour of Brown. The Labour Party Electoral College elected Blair as party leader on 21 July 1994, the other candidates being John Prescott and Margaret Beckett. After becoming Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, Blair was, as is customary for the holder of that office, appointed a member of the Privy Council, which permitted him to be addressed with the style "The Right Honourable".

Leader of the Labour Party

Shortly after his election as Leader, Blair announced at the conclusion of his 1994 conference speech that he intended to propose a new statement of aims and values for the Labour Party to replace the charter drawn up in 1918. This involved the complete replacement of Clause IV, which had committed the party to 'the common ownership of the means of production and exchange' (widely interpreted as wholesale nationalisation). A special conference of the party approved the change in March 1995.

While in Opposition, Blair also revised party policy in a manner that enhanced the image of Labour as competent and modern. He used the term "New Labour" to distinguish the party under his leadership from what had gone before. Although the transformation aroused much criticism (its alleged superficiality drawing fire both from political opponents and traditionalists within the "rank and file" of his own party), it was nevertheless successful in changing public perception. At the 1996 Labour Party conference, Blair stated that his three top priorities on coming to office were "education, education and education".

Aided by disaffection with the Conservative government (which was dogged by allegations of corruption, and long-running divisions over Europe), "New Labour" achieved a landslide victory over John Major in the 1997 UK general election.

First term 1997 to 2001

Independence for the Bank of England

Immediately after taking office, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown gave the Bank of England the power to set the base rate of interest autonomously. The traditional tendency of governments to manipulate interest rates around General Elections for political gain is thought to have been deleterious to the UK economy and helped reinforce a cyclical pattern of boom and bust, for which Blair frequently criticised previous governments. The decision was popular with the City, which the Labour Party had been courting since the early 1990s. Together with the government's avowed determination to remain within projected Conservative spending limits for the first two years of its period of office, it helped to reassure sceptics of the Labour Party's new-found fiscal "prudence". Brown, who had his own following within the Labour Party, is a powerful and independent Chancellor who was given exceptional freedom to act by Blair, although later reports by Downing Street insiders have said that Blair grew to regret this as he was cut out of important fiscal decisions.

Control over House of Commons

Blair has encouraged reforms to Parliamentary procedures. One of his first acts as Prime Minister was to replace the two weekly 15-minute sessions of Prime Minister's Questions, held on a Tuesday and Thursday, with a single 30-minute session on a Wednesday. This reform was said to be more efficient, but critics point out that it is easier to prepare for one long set of questions than two shorter interrogations. There has been a perception that Blair has avoided attending debates and voting in Parliament, although his vote has seldom been needed given Labour's large majorities in the House of Commons. (Labour Party objections to aspects of recent anti-terror and education legislation mean that every vote now matters ). In another reform, the Blair government introduced rules governing the sitting time of parliament, ostensibly to make it more businesslike, though arguably reducing MPs'

1. Biography: The Prime Minister Tony Charles Lynton Blair, 10 Downing Street. Retrieved 15 May 2006.
2. PM attacked on Iraq 'God' remarks. 4 March 2006. BBC News. Accessed on 19 May 2006.
3. Francis Elliott (14 May 2006). I'll step down next summer, Blair tells cabinet ministers. The Independent. Accessed on 19 May 2006.
4. "Tony's big adventure", The Observer, 27 April 2003.
5. PM 'attends Catholic Mass at No 10, The Independent, Marie Woolf, 02 April 2006.
6. Blair denies 'exploiting' family, BBC News, , 22 March, 2002.
7. The Sound of Tony, Private Eye covers, 15 June 2001
8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/16/nletter116.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/16/ixuknews.html"The full text of Tony Blair's letter to Michael Foot written in July 1982", The Daily Telegraph, June 16, 2006
10. America's Friend: Reflections on Tony Blair LOGOS 3.4, Mark Seddon, Fall 2004
11. About the Labour Party, The Labour Party, 02/06 2006
12. Religious hate Bill lost after Blair fails to vote, The Times, David Charter, February 01, 2006