III.

Prime Minister

A.

First Term

Blair, at the age of 43, became the youngest British prime minister in almost 200 years. After taking office, Blair vowed to honor his campaign pledge to abide by national spending limits and programs established by the preceding Conservative administration. At the same time, he launched ambitious new programs aimed at building better relations with the European Union (EU), decentralizing the national government, and reforming Britain’s welfare state.

Working within tight budgetary constraints, Blair’s government prioritized spending on education, national healthcare, and an extensive welfare-to-work program for young adults. The welfare-to-work program won praise for placing many unemployed in jobs. However, Blair and Labour aroused strong opposition for reducing benefits to single parents—another part of the government’s welfare reform program.

Blair emerged as an important adviser to the British royal family following the death of Princess Diana in August 1997. Many British citizens, grief-stricken by the tragedy of Diana’s death, criticized the royal family for their aloofness and lack of public presence during a time of national mourning. Blair helped convince Queen Elizabeth II to hold a public funeral and to become a more visible symbol to Britons.

In his first year in office Blair fulfilled his campaign promise to hold referendums in Scotland and Wales to devolve (decentralize) powers from the British Parliament to a Scottish parliament and a Welsh assembly. Both of the referendums passed, and in elections to the newly created legislative bodies the Labour Party emerged as the largest party. In addition, Blair worked to stimulate the faltering peace talks in Northern Ireland. Soon after taking office he established a new timeline for the talks. In October 1997 Blair met with Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA). The encounter marked the first time in 76 years that a British prime minister had met with a Sinn Fein leader. The peace talks were successfully concluded in April 1998 with the signing of the historic Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement. In May referendums to approve the peace plan received overwhelming support in Northern Ireland and Ireland.

In the international realm Blair maintained the United Kingdom’s strong relationship with the United States, and he worked to improve British links to continental Europe. Blair cultivated good personal relations with United States president Bill Clinton, a leader with whom Blair was often compared, and he backed the Clinton administration’s major international initiatives, including U.S. policy toward Iraq. Blair was one of the strongest proponents of the air offensive launched in March 1999 by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY, see Serbia and Montenegro) over Yugoslav actions in Kosovo. Blair’s government also took pains to improve British relations with its European partners. It declared that the United Kingdom would sign the European Social Chapter on employee rights, although it declined to commit the country to adopting the EU’s new single currency prior to another general election.

B.

Second Term

Buoyed by the strong performance of the British economy, Blair called general elections in June 2001. Blair led the Labour Party to its second consecutive landslide victory and secured a second term as prime minister. The elections gave the Labour Party 413 of the 659 seats in the House of Commons—just six fewer than it won in 1997—and a comfortable 167-seat governing majority. Blair declared the outcome a mandate from the British people for increased expenditures on health, education, transportation, and other public services—a key plank in the Labour Party’s campaign platform.

After the elections Blair resumed negotiations with Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern and Northern Ireland’s political parties in an effort to salvage the Northern Ireland peace process, which was repeatedly threatened by an impasse over the pace of IRA decommissioning (disarmament). The impasse led Blair’s government to suspend Northern Ireland’s provincial assembly several times including twice in mid-2001. In October 2001 the IRA announced that it had destroyed several caches of weapons, a move welcomed by Blair as proof that the political process was working in Northern Ireland. This concession allowed Northern Ireland’s provincial assembly to resume operations in November. However, persistent conflict among the parties resulted in another assembly suspension in October 2002. Blair and Ahern again found themselves working to build momentum for the peace process, yet little movement toward a restoration of home rule in Northern Ireland was evident.

Following the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, which resulted in the deaths of more than 100 British citizens among the thousands of casualties, Blair pledged that the United Kingdom would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States. Blair, working through diplomatic channels, played a central role in building a broad-based coalition against international terrorism. In October, when the United States launched attacks against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which was accused of harboring the al-Qaeda terrorist network believed responsible for the attacks, it was with the support of British naval and ground forces. In December the United Kingdom committed a contingent of troops to lead the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In the ensuing months Blair continued to maintain his high-profile support for U.S. military action, and in March additional British troops were deployed to Afghanistan.

In 2002 Blair emerged as a strong advocate of military action against the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which had come under intense pressure from the United States and the UN to prove that it was not harboring weapons of mass destruction. Blair argued that Hussein’s control of any such weapons posed a grave threat to regional and international security. Blair’s position allied him closely with United States president George W. Bush, but distanced him from many European leaders, including German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French president Jacques Chirac.

Blair’s support for military action in Iraq led to massive demonstrations across the United Kingdom. In February 2003 Blair survived the largest parliamentary revolt of his tenure as prime minister—over a government motion to back “all means necessary” to disarm Iraq. In March British forces joined the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, despite a failure to secure a UN resolution explicitly sanctioning the action. See U.S.-Iraq War.

The subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq opened Blair to criticism that he had led the United Kingdom to war on the basis of unreliable intelligence. In May 2003 Blair’s government was stung by accusations from a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist that the prime minister’s press office had been involved in presenting biased intelligence on Iraq. A public inquiry, released in January 2004, exonerated Blair’s government of such involvement.

A further inquiry was set up in February to assess the quality of the intelligence that had informed the decision to support the invasion of Iraq, and the use to which it had been put. The inquiry report, published in July, questioned the validity of the claims that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein possessed illegal weapons, though it did not support allegations that the intelligence had been deliberately presented in a misleading way. Blair was criticized in the report for the informal manner in which Cabinet discussions of the issue had been handled.

C.

Third Term

Blair called a general election for May 2005. An aggressive campaign by the Conservatives focused on the issue of Blair’s personal integrity, and the Liberal Democrats continued to criticize Blair’s support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Despite this, Blair became the first Labour leader to steer the party to three successive election victories and to secure a third consecutive term as prime minister. However, Labour emerged with a much reduced majority from its previous hold in the House of Commons, winning 356 of the 646 seats. Nevertheless, Labour comfortably exceeded the 324 seats needed to form a majority. Before the 2005 election, Blair had announced that it would be the last he planned to contest as Labour leader. Blair stepped down as prime minister in June 2007, after a decade in office, amid growing criticism of British involvement in the Iraq War. The Labour Party named Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, to succeed Blair as party leader and prime minister. Soon after his resignation Blair took on the role of special envoy to the Middle East and was charged with the task of salvaging and strengthening the Palestinian economy as part of the Middle East peace process. In this role Blair represented an international group consisting of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations, and the United States.