Tony Blair PM: 1997-2007
Blair quits after ten years in No 10
Wednesday, 27, Jun 2007 12:00
Tony Blair today stood down as prime minister after ten years in power.
No longer leader of the Labour party, he formally tendered his resignation to the Queen this afternoon.
For Gordon Brown this will conclude the long-promised transfer of power and for the country the arrival of its sixth Labour prime minister
Mr Blair is then expected to travel to his Sedgefield constituency where he will announce his resignation as MP and begin his post-parliamentary career as the youngest ex-prime minister since the Reform Act.
Ten years after he swept to power on the largest landslide ever achieved by a Labour government, Mr Blair has succeeded in his ambition to leave Downing Street at a time of his own choosing.
However, the public good will extended towards him in 1997 has not lasted through his record three general election wins.
If Mr Blair is not met by a chorus of jeers as he leaves parliament, his detractors will claim this is only because he banned protestors from Parliament Square.
As prime minister Mr Blair was criticised for an obsession with his legacy and, according to recent opinion polls, this will overwhelming be dominated by the invasion of Iraq and his closeness to George Bush.
Yet the same poll found Britons rate Mr Blair as a good prime minister overall, pointing to his record on social and economic reform.
Mr Blair arrived at Number 10 with a tightly controlled media image and a formidable approval rating. Today he leaves office with public opinion deeply divided and little idea how history will judge him.
"I did not come into politics to change the Labour party. I came into politics to change the country," Tony Blair, 1995.
Educated at Fettes and St John's College Oxford, Anthony Blair appeared more interested in music than politics until training as a pupil barrister at Lincoln's Inn. He joined the Labour party in 1975 under Harold Wilson and became a party activist in east London.
Mr Blair was selected to contest the safe Conservative seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election. Already aligned with the soft left of the Labour party, Mr Blair won ten per cent of the vote. Despite being forced to return his deposit, he impressed the then Labour leader Michael Foot.
When boundary changes created the Sedgefield constituency in 1983, Mr Blair succeeded in becoming a prospective parliamentary candidate.
Despite a nationwide defeat for Labour, Mr Blair entered parliament having campaigned on a traditional Labour left ticket, including exit from the European Economic Community and nuclear disarmament.
In his maiden speech to the House of Commons Mr Blair described himself as a socialist, but with the caveat this stood for cooperation not confrontation.
Mr Blair was assigned to an office with another MP from the 1983 intake – Gordon Brown – and the pair soon progressed through the shadow Cabinet.
By 1992 Mr Blair was beginning to modernise Labour's image. He used a promotion to shadow home secretary to establish Labour's credibility on crime, spawning the first Tony soundbite: "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".
The sudden death of John Smith created a vacancy for the Labour leadership and Mr Blair beat Margaret Beckett and John Prescott to the position. It is widely believed Mr Brown agreed to stand aside on the understanding Mr Blair would one day return the favour.
In his speech to the Labour party conference in 1994, Mr Blair said he would scrap Clause IV, calling on the party to drop its commitment to the shared ownership of the means of production.
Mr Blair was determined to rebrand Labour as a credible, electable party and in 1997 led New Labour to a landslide victory.
"Now is not the time for soundbites…But I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder," Tony Blair, 1998.
New Labour arrived in Downing Street promising to purge parliament of Tory sleaze but Mr Blair's reliance on spin soon earned him the unwelcome nickname "phoney Tony".
At his best Mr Blair could tap into a public nerve and provide journalists with the perfect sound bite. Later, his critics would accuse the prime minister of arrogance and an obsession with media management.
In his resignation speech Mr Blair admitted the "great expectations" of 1997 had been too great for him to fulfill. The prime minister by this point had already confessed he wished he had pushed further on virtually every reform, while many in Labour were relieved he had not.
Under Mr Blair's leadership, the Labour government introduced the minimum wage, lifted more than 2.4 million children out of poverty, revoked clause 28, introduced civil partnerships, improved maternity benefits, oversaw devolution in Scotland and Wales and the Northern Ireland peace process among other achievements.
But, many questioned the way in which improvements had been won in education and health, pointing to Mr Blair's market driven reforms. They also criticised Mr Blair's presidential style of government, increasingly authoritarian stance, including his commitment to ID cards, top-up fees and the growing divide between the rich and the poor.
For a man who arrived at Downing Street with the promise to be whiter than white, Mr Blair has also been dogged by the cash for honours scandal. He leaves with the uncomfortable claim to be the first prime minister to be interviewed by police while in office.
"Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war," Tony Blair, 1997.
For the foreseeable future, however, it appears that Mr Blair's premiership will be overwhelmed by his record on foreign policy, in particularly Iraq.
Mr Blair has succeeded in becoming on of the most belligerent prime ministers, fighting five wars in six years.
Initially, the prime minister won parliamentary and public approval for his so-called ethical foreign policy but he suffered an intense public backlash over the Iraq war.
This was intensified by the failure to find any weapons of mass distraction and the Butler Inquiry criticised the intelligence gathering in the lead up to the war. The death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly only added to the controversy.
Even Mr Blair admitted he was surprised by the scale of violence in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. In his exit speech, he acknowledged the blowback of global terrorism but again refused to apologise for the invasion.
"Thank god he is going," shadow chancellor George Osborn, 2006.
Mr Blair led his party to a record three general election wins and can claim to be the longest standing Labour prime minister.
While many historians say he failed to achieve the economic and social transformation of Clement Attlee he did expunge the public image that had tarnished Labour under James Callaghan.
His approval rating has surpassed 90 per cent and slipped as low as 26 per cent. He has retained the confidence of business leaders but Labour MPs have voted against their government on a number of key issues, including Iraq, university tuition fees and Trident.
Throughout it all Mr Blair insists he did what he thought was right.