I really wanted to be an actor, says Blair
( ... but we always thought you were, Tony!)
HIS critics would say he’s been hamming it up for years, now Tony Blair has revealed that in his youth he really wanted to be an actor.
The ex-Labour PM also said he had toyed with student Marxism and briefly been a ‘Trot’ while at Oxford – until his future wife Cherie talked him out of it.
The 64-year-old said his performing skills helped him as a politician. He said: ‘I was very keen always on acting, and I did a lot of acting at Fettes [his public school].
‘For various reasons I never continued it at Oxford, but I would have liked to have done that. So I guess there was always a certain, you know, I was in a rock band and all that sort of stuff, so there’s a certain performer element of my character that was obvious from an early age.
‘The characteristic of being prepared to go out and perform… was of enormous benefit to me in later life.’
Mr Blair, who studied law at university, said he had ‘actually wanted to read English originally, because I was so keen on acting’. He added: ‘But I then got into law and my father was a lawyer and my brother was a lawyer and, you know, law was in the family, as it were. But no, I always think law as an academic subject never really interested me, never excited me.’
On BBC Radio 4’s Reflections With Peter Hennessy, Mr Blair said his enthusiasm for the Left began when he picked up a Trotsky biography after a gig with his student band Ugly Rumours. He said: ‘I had no interest in politics. We were playing a gig, my rock band, and for some bizarre reason, when I got back I picked it up and started to read it. And I literally didn’t stop reading it all night. It opened a different world to me. ‘ I suddenly thought the world’s full of these extraordinary causes and injustices and here’s this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create a Russian revolution and change the world. It was like a light going on. And even though over time I obviously left that side of politics behind, the notion of having a cause and a purpose and one bigger than yourself or your own ambition – and I think probably allied at the same time to coming to religious faith – that changed my life in that period.’
Mr Blair said his interest lasted about a year until he began dating Cherie. ‘The great thing about Cherie is that she’s literally never changed her politics from the first time I met her,’ he said.
He also revealed that his deal with Gordon Brown over who should lead the Labour Party in 1994 was sealed in Edinburgh rather than, as legend has it, over a meal at the Granita restaurant in Islington.
He said: ‘We did have a dinner in the Granita, but by then we’d already decided what we were going to do. The actual conversation, I think, took place in a couple of different places in Edinburgh. One was definitely at an old school friend of mine’s house.’
The pact established a political partnership – and feud – after Mr Brown stepped aside.
SEVEN years ago, across two pages of this newspaper and under the headline ‘Asian gangs, schoolgirls and a sinister taboo’, The Mail’s Sue Reid revealed a deeply disturbing new trend.
In towns across the North and Midlands, she found countless schoolgirls falling prey to gangs who groomed them as sex slaves.
Picked up off the streets, the victims were plied with drink and drugs, taken to private homes and raped, then passed around to other men.
The police, the article warned, were failing to act to protect the vulnerable for fear of being branded racist – for the simple fact was that the vast majority of the sexual abusers were Asian, and their victims overwhelmingly white.
It was by any measure a brave piece of journalism. It was also very carefully and sensitively written so as not to inflame tensions.
Indeed, the article bent over backwards to point out that the vast majority of Asian men are ‘decent, law-abiding citizens’, adding that ‘rapists come from all racial and social backgrounds’.
But that wasn’t good enough for our Leftwing critics who pounced upon the article with the predictable cry of racism.
Indeed, one article in the New Statesman magazine complained vociferously that the Mail was focusing needlessly on the fact that most of the offenders were Asian and their victims mostly white and, despicably, linked the article to Fascism.
It gives this newspaper no comfort whatsoever to point out that in subsequent years we have been entirely vindicated.
The three towns featured in the article were Derby, Rochdale and Rotherham – a now notorious centre of abuse where more than 1,400 children were sexually abused.
To that list we can add Oxford, Peterborough, Aylesbury and – after the conclusion of a trial this week – Newcastle, where up to 108 victims aged as young as 13 were abused by 17 men. Nor is that the end of the matter, as several similar investigations are ongoing.
If there was any lingering doubt this is a national scandal, of the kind that should never happen in a civilised country like ours, that has surely been dispelled.
The penny even appears to have dropped at the BBC which for years – despite ever mounting evidence – was so cowed by political correctness it would censor any mention of the criminals’ background.
This was the same institutionalised political correctness which so paralysed the police, council officials and social workers that for years they refused to investigate the abuse wreaking misery across Britain.
The lesson of all this – at a time when liberals’ growing intolerance seeks to crush anyone who diverts from their narrow view of what can be discussed – is that censoring the truth is always very, very dangerous.
The Mail repeats: what is happening in these towns is a national scandal. It is beholden on all of us, particularly the authorities and the great majority of the Asian community who abhor this behaviour, to do everything possible to stamp it out. FOR the Labour Party, there is only ever one possible explanation for long waiting times and other pressures on the NHS: a lack of money. But a study reveals that – once social care is included – the UK spends one pound in every ten on health care, the same as most other wealthy European countries. Yes, the health service has problems, but blithely pouring in more billions without making essential reforms will not solve them. IN a BBC interview, Tony Blair says performance was part of his character ‘from a very early age’ – as he laments not having done more acting at university. Well, this actor-politician certainly made up for it on the political stage, with a lifetime of slippery performances.