“You’ve got to be strong enough to withstand the praise as well as the condemnation,” Tony Blair, now aged 72, tells audiences in the new Channel 4 documentary series, The Tony Blair Story. This, as the show demonstrates, is a man who knows a thing or two about praise and an awful lot about condemnation. And from his childhood in Scotland, through Oxford and county Durham to Downing Street and beyond, the story of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair proves easier to tell than to judge.
Over the course of three episodes – succinctly titled “Who Are You?”, “Iraq”, and “The Loss of Power” – The Tony Blair Story charts the course of one of Britain’s most impactful post-war premierships. Beginning with Blair’s family life, education and political conversion (his father was a lifelong Conservative member), the show develops alongside its protagonist. It canters through his election in Sedgefield in 1983, the forging of a stunningly effective pact with Gordon Brown, and his elevation, in 1994, to leader of the Labour Party. That all serves to arrive, midway through the first episode, at the landslide of the 1997 election. A “radical”, in the words of the author Robert Harris, he was “the Labour equivalent of Margaret Thatcher”. But, as with most political biographies, the arc of The Tony Blair Story soon begins to nosedive towards calamity.
