Blair Must Now Prove His ‘Radical Center’ Can Work

LONDON — Tony Blair came triumphantly to power here as the architect of a political revolution that has changed the face of British politics for good. Now doyen of what Blair calls the “radical center,” he must make a revolution work.

Such is the challenge that awaits ambitious, eager-to-please, driven Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. He has sought it unflaggingly since the day 15 short years ago when he abandoned law practice for a workers’ party with heavy ideological baggage and a loser’s image.

“I want it so badly . . . the chance to do something,” Blair said earlier this year as he charted the future of a reformed and revitalized Labor Party that had languished 18 years in the political wilderness. All his energies would go into propelling “new Labor” to power as a middle-of-the-road force for unity.

Now, at 43, Blair is the youngest prime minister of the United Kingdom this century, during which the opposition Conservative Party has ruled for 68 years. He is spectacular proof of the power of ideological gentrification.

Blair, born on the white-collar side of the street in a classist society, might have become a Conservative prime minister. That was the goal of his lawyer father, Leo, who suffered a stroke while running for Parliament when Blair was 11 in Sedgefield, a mining town near the northern English industrial city of Durham.

Blair has called his father’s illness--he could not speak for three years--”one of the formative events of my life. . . . It imposed a certain discipline. I felt I couldn’t let him down.”

Blair, who has said he considers education to be Britain’s paramount domestic challenge, talks about schools as a ladder of escape. For him, they were steps to power: first as a scholarship student at a prestigious private high school in Edinburgh, where he was born May 6, 1953; then in 1972-75 at Oxford University’s all-male St. John’s College.

In high school, the lean, broad-shouldered Blair played rugby, cricket and basketball. But at college, with hair beyond his shoulders, he mixed law studies with gigs as lead singer of a band called Ugly Rumours, which tried to sound like Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. One of Blair’s campaign vows this year was to never again play loud music.

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At Oxford, wellspring of the British establishment for centuries, students avoided traditional parties in the effervescent ‘70s. Blair spent a lot of time talking about radical theology and Christian socialism but showed no particular political bent when he graduated to become a law clerk.

Two turning points in Blair’s life occurred in the London office where he went to work. The first was meeting fellow clerk Cherie Booth, today a high-powered attorney. They married in 1980, have three children spaced two years apart, and live in Islington, a firmly Labor borough in north London.

Blair’s second and ultimately decisive turning point was discovering that he didn’t like being a lawyer.

“I would never have been satisfied,” he has said.

Instead, he turned full time to politics, campaigning as a Labor candidate in 1982 for Parliament in Beaconsfield west of London. He got clobbered.

But Blair’s youth and zeal, among other things, impressed elders of a party whose bedrock support lay among trade unions and the factory, mill, shipbuilding, mining and transportation workers they represented in a computer age.

In 1983, he went home to Sedgefield, beat leftist opponents and, on May 20 of that year, became Labor’s candidate. Three weeks later, young Tony Blair was a freshman member of Parliament.

He has been there ever since, representing Sedgefield initially as a junior lawmaker who blossomed steadily to become a shadow Cabinet minister and then, beginning in 1994, the leader of the opposition.

“I am a socialist,” began Blair’s maiden speech in 1983, a faithful echo of a turn of the century mass movement that believed in nationalization and collectivism and, in 1916, wrote Clause Four of its constitution asserting “communist equality” and “common ownership of the means of distribution, production and exchange.”

Beginning in 1979, Labor writhed impotently as “Iron Lady” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher smashed the unions and began a historic and continuing round of privatizing industries that turned Britain foursquare to the free market.

Blair figured while Labor burned.

“Power without principle is barren,” he would say in 1995, “but principle without power is futile.”

Winning power meant winning voter confidence in a party seen as obdurate, outmoded and wed to inflationary tax-and-spend ideas.

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Not for Blair was the hope of reversing privatizations, rebuilding socialism or yearning for yesterday’s political ideas to return to fashion. Instead, he set out to build a modern, forward-looking social democratic party that would attract new voters.

In what he calls New Labor, “community” replaces “collectivism” as a governing principle. Blair sees himself as architect of a “one nation” Britain--confident, looking to the next century--in which differences of class, age and ethnicity are muted by a common will for the common good.

“We are about a set of values . . . and the basic essence of these values is that the individual thrives best in a well-functioning community of people,” Blair says.

The state would acknowledge individual initiative as the heart of the society but would burnish it, Blair believes, with competent, caring, cost-effective management.

Blair has great energy, enormous bounce. He is earnest and infectious. He seems almost compelled to tell you his story, paint you his picture, be your friend, get you on his side.

Blair, one British analyst says, wants to be in charge, and he wants to be cool.

In a tour de force, Blair persuaded Labor to formally scrap the controversial Clause Four. After he won that vote, with 65% backing from Labor Party members, it was clear that Britain was seeing a basic political shift.

“The Modernizer” became one Blair nickname, and he carried it to new and sometimes improbable places.

Times have changed. The Britain that came to a young, energetic leader is an again-confident nation where nobody bemoans the loss of the Empire, old chap, and the economy, one of the world’s largest, is growing more quickly than in any other major European nation.

The Conservatives of defeated John Major justly claim credit for a lot of that. But tired, scandal-stalked and riven by infighting after 18 sapping years of power, the Tories could not match Blair’s can-do tomorrow spirit.

The British people, ultimate arbiters, considered thoughtfully and made two decisions: One, it was time for a change. Two, Tony Blair was a safe pair of hands.