Steeples and Spires

Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader
by Philip Stephens

(Page 3 of 5)

Tony Blair grew up on a journey through the pages of British history. The nation's future prime minister lived his early life among the church steeples, ancient clock towers, and medieval quadrangles that are the childhood playgrounds of England's affluent middle classes. The Chorister School, attached to the ancient cathedral in the English city of Durham, was his stepping-stone to Fettes College, Scotland's most renowned public (what Americans know as "private") school. From there the road led to St. John's, one of the richest colleges amid the dreaming spires of the University of Oxford; and then, as a prelude for a young man seeking a career in the law, to the Inns of Court, the London home to the elaborate wigs and flowing gowns of the English legal establishment. When Blair finally arrived as a member of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster in 1983, the Gothic splendor of the nation's seat of democracy seemed all of a piece with the cloisters of his youth.

Somewhere along the way, though, his path had veered. The august institutions of his early life were the conventional route to a career on the right, or Conservative, wing of British politics. No one would have been surprised if Blair had risen quickly through the ranks of the Conservative Party. After all, his own father, Leo, before he had fallen victim to ill health, had harbored serious hopes himself of becoming a Tory MP. But the son chose the politics of the left, membership in a Labour Party that, even as he joined it, seemed to be facing inexorable decline. The roots of the young Tony Blair's political outlook, his moral conviction and the internationalism that would cast him as a formidable actor on the world stage, were thus located beyond the ornamented architecture of his youth: in Christian faith, in experience forged by family tragedy, in a set of values borrowed from another age, in unshakable self-belief, and, as ever in politics, in personal ambition. Many times in his later political career, Blair would remind his audiences that he was a Labour politician by choice. Others had been born to the party of the left, their beliefs nurtured by family tradition, by childhood deprivation, or by tribal class loyalties. Tony Blair was different. Even as its leader and as prime minister, he maintained a degree of detachment from his party.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh on May 6, 1953. His father, Leo, was a university lecturer in law, a career that took the family during the children's earliest years to Adelaide, Australia. By the time the future prime minister had reached the age of five, they had returned to England, where Leo combined a blossoming career as a lawyer with his teaching. Their base was the northeastern city of Durham, which boasted contemporary prosperity and an illustrious past. Home to a prominent university, it was also a place where Leo could build a flourishing practice as a senior courtroom lawyer - in the British term, a barrister - on England's northern judicial circuit. Young Tony, the second of three children, enjoyed a world of comfortable privilege. His father was scarcely rich, but he was prosperous enough to opt out of the state-funded schools system and himself pay for the children's education. Leo was a man who had made his own luck in life. He was ambitious for himself, and equally so for his two sons and daughter.

Affluence had not come easily. Born to parents who led the peripatetic life of music hall performers, Leo Blair had been all but abandoned as a child to a foster family in Glasgow, the city that was then at the industrial heart of Scotland. He did keep one link, though, to his parents: his son Tony's middle names, Lynton and Charles, were borrowed from Leo's natural father - one was the music hall performer's given name, the other his stage name. Leo's escape route from the grim tenement blocks of his childhood was service in the army during World War II. Before the war he had been forced to leave school at the age of fourteen to take a job as a clerk, but he rose quickly through the junior ranks of the military to become an officer. Once the war was over he returned to full-time education and a career, eventually, in the law. Like many in a generation that had had to struggle, he determined that his children would have better. His politics had also changed. As a teenager from a deprived background Leo had flirted with the politics of the extreme left; as an army officer about to take up a career in the law, he decided to join the Conservatives.

Tony's mother, Hazel, was of a different character. Where Leo was ambitious and gregarious, she was gentle and quiet. Born in Ireland - in her famous son's description, "in the flat above her grandmother's hardware shop on the main street of Ballyshannon in Donegal" - she had moved to Glasgow when her father had died, and there had met and married Leo. The family kept its ties with Ireland. When Tony Blair became the first British prime minister to address the Irish parliament, he recalled fondly that as a schoolboy he had spent almost every summer vacation in Donegal: "It was there in the seas off the Irish coast that I learned to swim, there that my father took me to my first pub, a remote little house in the country, for a Guinness." Lacking the career ambitions of her husband, Hazel looked after the house and raised the family. She was "almost painfully shy," her son said many years later. "She was entirely without malice. I don't think I ever heard her say a bad word about anyone." She steered the family through not just her husband's recovery from a sudden stroke but also the illness of her daughter, Sarah, the youngest of the three children. At the age of eight Sarah had developed Still's disease, a form of rheumatoid arthritis. Hazel moved on from nursing her husband to caring for her daughter. Sarah recovered, but only after intensive treatment that required long spells in the hospital and unpleasant side effects from the prescribed drug treatment.

Durham Chorister School, which Tony attended from the age of eight (he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, William), had been founded several centuries earlier to educate the boys who sang in the city's ancient cathedral choir. In the 1950s the traditions of the church school still lived on, but it had a broader intake, serving as one of the quintessentially English preparatory or "prep" schools, to which the middle classes sent their children to begin a formal education. Later the prime minister would recall of these early experiences an age and an education in which the premium was on good manners, values that were reinforced by his parents. What mattered, Blair remembered in newspaper interviews, was "respect for others, courtesy, giving up your seat for the elderly, saying please and then thank you." If he was told off at school, he recalled, his mother would apologize on his behalf to the teacher. Tony Blair carried Hazel's admonitions into political life. The young politician made his way in the Labour Party as a "modernizer," a leader eager to discard the past. But his personal manners, almost Victorian in their studied politeness, harked back to gentler times. Whatever his faults, Blair is an unfailingly courteous politician, one rarely heard to raise his voice in anger, one who always dispatches a note of thanks in response to a kindness or courtesy.

His time at Fettes College, to which he traveled at the age of thirteen, was an unhappy interlude. His father's choice of Scotland's foremost public school in part spoke to his own roots in Scotland. But it was primarily a statement of social intent. In the mind of a father who had struggled to succeed, Tony and his siblings were destined for the upper ranks of British society. Perched on the edge of Edinburgh and built in a chaos of architectural styles that somehow manage to combine the Scottish baronial with the French Gothic, Fettes was established in 1870 as a boarding school for Scotland's rich merchant classes. The school's founding ambition was to produce the educated young men who would go out into the world in pursuit of the nation's commercial fortunes and in service of the British Empire. It was organized from the start on the English public school principle that said rigorous discipline and austerity would build what the English call "character" in the children of the wealthy. This was the world, harsh and often calculatedly cruel, immortalized by Thomas Hughes in the classic 1857 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Nearly a century on, the vast empire the school once served had dissolved. But the atmosphere at Fettes was still austere, the discipline rigorous and often illogical. Ian MacIntosh, the headmaster, would have been happier in an earlier century. A staunch traditionalist and disciplinarian, his ambition at Fettes was to preserve the past. But the times were against him, for the 1960s were a period of social upheaval. The age of deference was passing, to be replaced by rock music, long hair, and satirical irreverence. MacIntosh refused to acknowledge the thirst for modernity, and to those who complained he would reply, "I'd like to hear everything you say - before I say, 'No.'" When the boys grew their hair longer, he ordered it cut. The young Tony Blair was one of the victims. The school's official history records that Blair found himself marched to the barber's shop by the headmaster: "He took him straight in and stood there, unrelenting, as the cherished mop was trimmed." Blair would remember his years there as a difficult time. Much later, when he was asked as prime minister to write the foreword to the school history, he felt obliged to agree. But there was no warmth of memory in the published words.

The young Blair rebelled against Fettes's petty regulations and archaic ordinances. The bulging book of rules extended even to the number of blazer buttons the boys (the school finally decided to admit girls only in his final year there) were required to keep closed at all times. Seniority gave prefects the right to flog younger boys with a cane, the beatings sometimes taking the form of public rituals to humiliate as well as hurt the victims. The hierarchy required younger boys to polish the seniors' boots, clean their sports kits, and run errands for them. The shared dormitories - MacIntosh thought private rooms even for senior boys would soon have become "dens of iniquity" - were spartan, the showers cold. Blair found the environment suffocating. More than once he was caught escaping over the school walls to evade the ban on excursions into Edinburgh's city center. He left at the age of eighteen with a clutch of unhappy memories and a reputation among the school's masters as a rebel, albeit one whose misdemeanors were rarely grave. Yet Fettes had left its mark. Later, friends and acquaintances would comment that Blair showed in later life the very respect for authority against which he had rebelled at school.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Philip Stephens is a senior editor of the UK edition of the Financial Times and writes a column on political and economic affairs in Britain and Europe. He is the 2002 winner of the David Watt Prize for outstanding political journalism.