Blair, a memorable prime minister
Posted: Thursday, May 10, 2007 7:16 AM
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London, England
By Chris Hampson, NBC News London Bureau Chief
You know when you’ve been around a long time when you can’t readily recall how many prime ministers have been through 10 Downing Street in your lifetime.
I can vividly remember Maggie Thatcher’s victory in 1979. I got my job as a political correspondent for a national newspaper on the back of it. She changed my life, and – for better or worse, depending on your politics – the nation’s as well.
Eleven years later I recollect, equally intensely, watching the removal men pack up her furniture and move her out of Downing Street, her belongings in packing cases and the Iron Lady in tears.
But most of all I remember May 2, 1997 – when Tony Blair became the country’s youngest prime minister of the 20th century, ending 18 years of Conservative rule, with promises of a different Britain.
He had succeeded where many distinguished politicians had failed, in transforming the feuding, ideologically-riven, left-leaning Labour movement from a party of protest, to a party of government. Their traditional Red Flag image was finally buried – and the center ground of politics firmly seized. The victory left his political opposition foundering for years.
Love him or hate him, he brought change
I was brought up in a Labour household, right next door to where the party workers would gather during elections to rally the faithful.
That wasn’t a hard task in the industrial engine-room of the North West of England where I was raised in the 1950s and ’60s. In my street you’d sooner admit to beating your children than voting Conservative.
My father used to say that he would never knowingly let a Tory in the house. Thatcher made him curse. My brother never dared to tell him he had once transgressed and voted for the lady.
So, had he lived to see it, my dad would have joined the celebrations and danced a little jig on Blair’s landslide victory. The atmosphere was electric. Love him or hate him, you knew some things were going to be different.
Now 10 years later – but a lot, lot older – Blair is also packing up and moving on, handing over the reins to his next-door neighbor in Downing Street, Chancellor Gordon Brown.
As well as running the country, Brown now has to rebuild Labor’s flagging popularity in the face of a resurgent Conservative party.
Legacy? Depends on the beholder
How will history judge Blair? That depends to some extent where you’re reading this.
If you’re sitting in Northern Ireland, you can look safely out of your window without the risk of a petrol bomb or bullet crashing through it. The Troubles, as the sectarian violence became known, have been consigned to history. That is Blair’s chosen legacy.
In you’re in the United States, you will likely regard the British prime minister as a friend and ally who supported the country in the War on Terror.
But over here, Blair’s closeness to President Bush and his backing of the invasion of Iraq is seen by many of Labour’s bedrock supporters as a huge mistake – by some a betrayal – that colors everything else he’s done.
In his resignation speech Blair asked that whatever else people think, they accept one thing: that while he may have made mistakes, "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right."
There are those, no doubt, who will be dancing a jig at his going. Others will perhaps pause a little longer to reflect.
It’s not too often you see people of Blair’s political charisma cross the world stage. For sure, he’s one prime minister that I, for one, will have no trouble recalling.
