Steeples and Spires, Part 3

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

(Page 5 of 5)

He was a diligent student at Oxford. His three-year degree course saw him following in his father's and his elder brother's footsteps in law. The young Blair found plenty of time for rock music and girlfriends, but he also worked hard to secure a good, if not greatly distinguished, degree. In other words, his was the normal student life in the Britain of the 1970s. If he pushed against the boundaries of college discipline, as at Fettes, the rebelliousness had limits. Friends recall that he spent more than the requisite number of hours pouring over the detail of arcane legal precedents in the college library. The most risqué story told by a contemporary concerns an evening spent playing "strip poker" - with Blair and a female friend duly paying the required forfeit in full when the cards went against them. True to his love of the stage, he was lead singer for a rock band. His role model was the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger - who else in the early 1970s? He also played at playing guitar. Those who saw Ugly Rumours (the band's name was taken from the cover of a Grateful Dead album) at student concerts recall the music as energetic but pretty dire. Blair dressed in the student uniform of the age - shoulder-length hair, multicolored T-shirts, cotton trousers tight at the waist and flared at the ankles. Folklore has it he added platform shoes to the ensemble. The lead singer's gyrations, friends remember, served him well as far as meeting girls was concerned, but Ugly Rumours struggled to find paying audiences. "It's true that they did not play very often...but they practiced a lot," jokes one friend. Like the quip about cannabis, the band became part of the official narrative of the Labour leader's early life. A rock-star youth fitted the image of a rising young politician. And as prime minister, Blair did start paying serious attention to playing the guitar, which he found helped relieve the stress.

One friend recalls that at school and university Blair was indeed a natural leader - in organizing social excursions: "He was always the one saying let's go to this party or that concert...the rest of us followed along." But if he enjoyed the rock-star image and honing his acting talents in college revues, Blair eschewed the traditional playgrounds of student politics. He took no interest in the Oxford Union, the debating society that through the generations has nurtured and polished the oratorical skills of scores of Britain's most distinguished politicians. He did participate in one or two student demonstrations, but belonged to neither the Conservative nor Labour party clubs. "The fact that he became leader of the Labour Party surprised and puzzled lots of people," recalled one of his contemporaries at St. John's. "It didn't surprise us that he turned into an earnest young man, nor probably that he chose politics as his way of making a difference. But it was a surprise that he reached the top." Other contemporaries thought he would continue to follow in the footsteps of his father and elder brother and turn out to be a successful lawyer. The stage was good practice, after all, for the courtroom. Perhaps, at a stretch, he would become an impresario, or something else in the entertainment business - he had spent much of the "gap" year between leaving school and starting university as a would-be promoter of up-and-coming rock bands in London. No one thought they had made friends with a future prime minister.

In later life, members of Blair's university set would join the worlds of business, banking, public service, and journalism, as well as politics. Several, including the future Australian politician Geoff Gallop and another Australian, a priest by the name of Peter Thomson, remained friends with the future prime minister. One in particular, though, stood out. Anji Hunter, two years younger than Blair, had first met him when he was at Fettes and she at a nearby boarding school for girls. This was not an early romance - or so at least both parties have always insisted. But Hunter arrived in Oxford to finish her schooling while he was at St. John's. Their friendship thrived and was to endure well beyond their student days. During the late 1980s Hunter served as the manager of Blair's Westminster office and was soon one of his indispensable aides. After his election victory in 1997 she was appointed special assistant to the prime minister - friend, confidante, and political fixer rolled into one.

Looking back, there were one or two clues as to the direction of Blair's own future. The rock and roll and the long spells in the library grappling with case law still left time during Oxford evenings for deep philosophical discussions about the nature of man, the future of society, and the dismal condition of politics in its broad sense. The world of the early 1970s was a turbulent place, and the mood of young university students correspondingly restless. The Vietnam War was just drawing to its close, the cold war ever present; the OPEC oil price rises had shocked the West out of its economic complacency; the world's poor seemed to be getting poorer. Closer to home, Edward Heath's Conservative government was embroiled in a titanic struggle with the trade unions, and in Northern Ireland the British army was fighting in the streets against Irish Republicans. This was more than enough to worry and intrigue a group of intelligent young people interested in the nature of the society they would join. In the shifting circle of four or five, sometimes six or seven, undergraduates of which Blair was part, the political and philosophical works of Marx, Engels, and Gramsci were the subject of earnest discussion. The group included a young Ugandan, Olaro Otunno, who went on to become his country's foreign minister, as well as Geoff Gallop.

Philosophy, politics, and religion were all part of the discourse. Friday afternoons at St. John's were given over to public debate among the college's students. At one such event the young Blair offered a rather dry analysis of Marx's philosophical manuscripts. More important, though, his mind was open to fresh ideas. Speaking in the summer of 2003, he recalled that, in spite of all those spires and cloisters, he never felt any great weight of tradition. Because his family had moved around when he was young, and his father was a foster child, "I couldn't trace my family back three centuries. My parents had worked their way up and they came from different backgrounds. I have always therefore accepted people pretty much as they are rather than [in relation to] where they have come from." That did not mean he lacked roots, but rather that "they were very much in the ideas you formed rather than in a particular sort of traditional upbringing."

The memories etched most deeply on the mind of the young Tony Blair were not those of brushes with authority at school, wrestling with Marx's dialectic, or playing in a rock band. For all the material comforts of his childhood, his formative moments were those of family misfortune and spiritual awakening. The first shock to the comfortable assumptions of youth came at the age of eleven when he was woken one morning by his mother to be told his father had suffered a sudden stroke. For a short time it seemed that Leo, still only forty and in the prime of a successful career, might not survive. Much later Blair recalled the event as "the day my childhood ended." His father pulled through, but he had lost his speech and much of his movement, leaving him effectively bedridden for months. Hazel nursed him back to health, but it was an agonizingly slow process, and several years passed before Leo recovered sufficiently to return to work. The family remained financially secure, but without the room to spare of earlier years. Gradually, Leo was able to rebuild his legal career, but the burgeoning ambitions for a life in Conservative politics - he had by now become the chairman of the party's local association and was looking for a seat in Parliament - had to be abandoned. More than two decades afterward, Tony spoke movingly about this period during a speech to the Labour Party's annual conference. His father's illness, he said, "taught me the value of the family, because my mother worked for three years to help him walk and talk again." He also learned the worth of community. The fair-weather friends disappeared, "but the real friends, the true friends, they stayed with us...they stuck with us for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do." "I don't pretend to you," Blair told a now-hushed audience, "that I had a deprived childhood. I didn't. But I learned a sense of values in my childhood."

As he finished his studies at Oxford, the twenty-two-year-old learned that now his mother was desperately ill, having been diagnosed a few years earlier with cancer of the thyroid. Surgery had removed the growth, and for a time there were hopes of a remission. But the disease had taken hold. Returning home from Oxford after his final examinations in the summer of 1975, Blair found that the worst had been kept from him for fear it might disrupt his studies. His mother had only a short time left. During her last days in the hospital, Hazel saw each of her three children in turn and, as Tony put it, "went through things with us." Then, at the age of only fifty-two, she was gone. The loss of a mother is the most painful moment in the life of a son. After the illnesses of his father and sister, the effect on the young Tony Blair was devastating. Some thirty years later, when Tony was in 10 Downing Street, his brother, William, recalled their mother's death. "The effect of our father's stroke on Tony has often been analyzed," he said in a newspaper interview. "Many people say the ambition of the father was transferred to the son. But it was more complicated than that....I think people have tended to underestimate the role my mother played in forming Tony's view of life."

As the prime minister himself explained further in July 2003, his father's illness had been a tremendous blow "because the family's security disappeared overnight....And when I look back, I think that was very important." Then, just as he crossed the threshold into adulthood, came his mother's death. "I remember when my father told me that my mother was dying, and she was going to die. I remember the shock of it absolutely. You thought that these things just didn't happen." As with his father's illness, he said, it was as if the family had been robbed of its security. He found it a deeply sobering as well as a sad time. There had been moments, he said, when he could have gone off and "done something wild....I definitely had that part in me to be like that." His father's stroke had pulled him back from such adventures. Now, after the death of his mother, he approached everything "with a lot more focus and determination, which I suppose is natural."

© 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.