Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
On March 18, 2003, the atmosphere in the ornate wood-paneled chamber of Britain's House of Commons crackled with electricity. The green leather benches of the nation's legislative chamber were packed to overflowing.

Introduction, Part 2
There are echoes of an earlier age in Tony Blair's premiership. His approach to foreign policy has its roots in the interventionism of the nineteenth-century Liberal British prime minister William Gladstone.

Chapter 1: Steeples and Spires
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

On March 27, 2003, President George W. Bush said, "America has learned a lot about Tony Blair over the last weeks ... and we're proud to have him as a friend." Despite the President's assertion, the average American knows little about Tony Blair except that he remained one of America's strongest allies in the war on terror and, ultimately, in the war against Iraq. But why? What is Blair's agenda? Is he just trying to further England's cause or his own? And how has this man, the youngest British prime minister in centuries, kept strong ties with such fundamentally different presidents as Clinton and Bush?

Philip Stephens - editor of the UK edition of the Financial Times and a man who has known Blair since the beginning of his career - answers for the first time these questions for the American public. Stephens follows the emerging world leader from his boyhood to his leadership of the Labor party and, along the way, exposes his beliefs, his personality, his shortcomings and contradictions, and his role in shaping a new international order.

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..

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