‘It was electrifying’: the inside story of Labour’s 1997 election landslide

Britain's new prime minister, Tony Blair, in 1997 greeting well-wishers after overturning 18 years of Conservative rule. Photograph: Max Nash/AP

As voters headed to the polls on the morning of 1 May 1997, Tony Blair turned to his old friend Charlie Falconer and asked an unexpected question.

“On the day of the election itself he asked me if he thought he’d get back to the bar – and he didn’t mean the licensed bar, he meant the legal bar,” Falconer recalls 27 years later. Unconvinced by predictions of the Labour landslide to come, the party leader wanted to know whether he might be able to return to his old career as a barrister.