Tony Blair: I was a ‘Trot’
He fell under revolutionary’s spell
TONY Blair has admitted he was a left-wing Trot as a student and believed Labour was far too right-wing.
His enthusiasm for hard-left politics was fired up by reading a biography of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after a gig with his rock band Ugly Rumours in the 1970s. He said: “I didn’t stop reading it all night. It opened a different world.
“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.” The ex-PM, who dragged Labour to the right in the 1990s, said when he joined the party after Oxford University he thought its leaders were “betrayers of socialism”. He said his shift towards the centre ground was influenced by wife Cherie, whom he met as they were training to be barristers in 1976. He added: “She had complete contempt for the far left.” Mr Blair still has no time for it, attacking the current movement for “riding the anger, not providing answers”. In the Radio 4 interview , he also admitted a “gap of understanding” about the Iraq War aftermath.