UK/FILE: Tony Blair nears ten year anniversary serving as Britain's prime minister

On May 2, 1997 Tony Blair became the youngest prime minister since 1812. On a wave of goodwill, Labour was swept to power by a country desperate to see a change from 18 years of Conservative rule. He is credited for transforming the image of staid Britain into Cool Britannia, rubbing shoulders with pop stars at Number Ten and portraying himself a regular down-to-earth family man. Alongside some of Europe's older statesman, Blair cut a youthful figure at one of his first EU summits by cycling around Amsterdam. His brand of reformist centre-left politics was dubbed the Third Way. Soon after taking office, his government espoused what Blair called humanitarian interventionism, calling for an ethical dimension to foreign policy. In March 1999, NATO's military campaign against Serb aggression in Kosovo was in large part due to Blair's dogged determination to get the Alliance to act. "We fought in this conflict for a cause and this cause was justice," Blair told Kosovars who greeted him as their saviour. A little after a year in office, in April 1998 Blair scored a major political victory as the Good Friday Agreement deal on Northern Ireland was reached, paving the way for devolved government in Northern Ireland. On May 8, 2007 and the Northern Ireland Assembly is due to sit for the first time and opinion is in Britain that Blair will finally announce his quit date soon after that, to make his announcement on a high note. Peter Riddell is a political columnist for the Times newspaper and writer of 'The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair's Quest for a Legacy'. Riddell predicts Blair will announce his timetable for departure next week, "I think Tony Blair is going to announce at last that he is stepping down after the local elections, probably somewhere around the 9th, 10th of May, that will also be after the Northern Ireland devolution, he hopes, will be launched. So he'll have had ten years, he'll be able to point to a success in Northern Ireland, then he'll say he's stepping down as prime minister, triggering a process and he will cease being prime minister probably the first few days of July." Ten years, the war on Iraq and political scandals have eroded Britons faith in the Blair government. A recent BPIX poll for The Observer newspaper shows a well over fifty per cent of voters believe the country is a more dangerous, less happy place to live after a decade of Blair power. Blair will spend this week keen to highlight that he presided over booming economic success and an era of money being ploughed into the health service - but the issue of Iraq and the cash-for-honours scandal that looms large in the British psyche. The Iraq war is seen as Blair's lowest point, with 58 per cent judging it his biggest failure, almost two-thirds thought he had just followed America. Blair has remained unrepentant about his decision to go to war in Iraq. "The problem is, I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam," he told the Labour Party conference in 2004. At that same conference he made pledge that he would not seek a fourth term as Labour leader, and Britons have been wondering exactly when he will quit ever since. Last September Chancellor Gordon Brown led an attempted coup, forcing Blair to agree he wouldn't serve out the whole of his last term. Riddell said that was very damaging to Blair's grip on power, "It is obvious that his power has been ebbing away from him in an authorative decline so he now looks like a rather lonely figure, so yes, in the short term I think he has stayed on too long," he said. Once Blair announces his departure that will trigger a seven week Labour leadership race, with Chancellor Gordon Brown right now being the only serious contender. It's likely Blair will stay on as prime minister until end of June, meaning he will still preside over the G8 summit in Germany.

ITN Source | May 1, 2007

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