It was Tony Time

Tony Blair, the British prime minister who retired in 2007, is thought of as a leader who was able to find his country's emotional wellsprings after Princess Diana's death.

Blair's senior advisers played the Diana card very carefully. On the one hand, they didn't want to be seen as milking her death for po­litical gain; on the other, they recognized that Blair's great strength was his crossover appeal. For the first time in many years, the La­bour Party had a leader who was as welcome - if not more so -among the decent, suburban, queen-loving, church going English as he was with the comrades of the trade-union movement and his os­tensibly socialist party. That gave him a broad-based political appeal epitomized by one line in one of his speeches «comparison with a hard edge».

The Thatcheresque echo in that line is deliberate. Baroness Thatcher is no longer much of a presence in British politics, but her

legaсу of political toughness and economic reform is immensely influential. By combining an appeal to Diana's Britain - with Thatch­er's iron determination, Blair created a popular political bridge for himself. He became «part of the new, touchy-feely Britain, combined with the hardness of Margaret Thatcher».

The people around the prime minister saw him as both the archi­tect and beneficiary of Britain's «quiet revolution». Blair was the agent of change, and Britons were ready for change.

Yes. but what change? Unusually for Britain, which tends to shy from such questions, there's a lively debate now underway about both what kind of country it has become and what it would like to be. Blair's own polling and focus groups show that, Britons are gaming confidence in themselves as a nation and buying into the parity man­tra «new» Labour, new Britain».

For all the manifold benefits that the Thatcher years brought to many Britons, they were also a period of deconstruction: unions lost power, state institutions were privatized and Thatcher's emphasis on the individual seemed to some to threaten traditional notions of so­ciety and community. As it took office, Labour had a list of things it wanted to do and when it wanted to do them - billions extra for schools and hospitals, a national minimum wage, reduced class sizes, historical constitutional reform that would give Scotland a Parlia­ment and Wales a less powerful assembly, a real go at peace in Northern Ireland. It would all give the country a sense of what its prime minister stood for.

«We've been out of power so long that party leaders are used to addressing the hall», says a Blair aide. «This time Tony needed to address the nation». At poolside in a friend's Tuscan villa, Blair be­gan to sketch out the broad outlines of his message, including his no­tion of Britain as «the model 21 st-century nation». Honed over the weeks by a team of writers, it would come out this way in Brighton: what was needed in this new Britain was «old British values, but a new British confidence. We can never be the biggest. We may never again be the mightiest. But we can be the best. The best place to live. The best place to bring up children, the best place to lead a fulfilled life, the best place to grow old”.

That was risky talk. To the famous «chattering class» of London journalists, academics and Whitehall mandarins such language was almost unbearably winsome, redolent (they sniff) of America at its worst. What allowed Blair to pull it off can be said in one word: Diana.

The prime minister was not, as it happens, particularly close to the princess. But one weekend after the election Diana brought her boys to Chequers, the prime minister's country house, to play foot­ball with Blair's children. That would explain, as much as anything else, why on the morning of Diana's death Blair's voice caught on the word «boys» when he spoke so emotionally of her death. His conscientious effort to secure a people's funeral for the «people's princess» earned him near-universal approval.

There was one thing, above all, that Blair's strategies took from the Diana phenomenon. «There was an unmistakable yearning for community», says one of his advisers. That word means a lot to Blair; since his earliest days in politics, he wrote and spoke about the importance of community, sometimes with a religious fervor. His se­nior aides believed that his use of communitarian thinking was one of his greatest assets; but here again, the chattering classes were skeptical; to them, the whole notion of community was gauzy and content-free.

The hard truth is that Blair did not tackle the really difficult questions that dominated his premiership - sorting out Britain's rela­tionship with the European Union, welfare reform, improving skill levels. One thing is plain: the Diana phenomenon helped Blair scale such dizzy heights.

Answer the questions:

1. Can you prove that Toni Blair mixed Diana – style compassion with Thatcher – like toughness? Did this strategy work according to the article?

2. What new realities did he find important to bring into practice?

3. How did he claim to change Britain’s image? Why was that risky talk?

4. What thing did Blair’s strategies take from the Diana phenomenon?