Should I call you Sir Anthony? Tony Blair laughs. "Er, no," he says, looking alarmed. But the Queen has finally made him a noble knight of the realm. Cherie is now Lady Blair.
"Look, you can still call me Tony," he insists. Is he going to have a garter? "I mean, I think technically I am supposed to have one and a coat of arms. The kids keep teasing me mercilessly about my garb and whether I have to wear tights."
The former prime minister's voice is immediately recognisable, along with the slight shake of the head and the language. "I mean", "you know", "actually" and "the kids" instantly catapult me to back to the images of him at the turn of the millennium singing Auld Lang Syne with the monarch under a glass fibre dome.
Those were simpler times, when all the nation was worried about was the millennium bug, Cherie's contraception and whether Blair would be changing the new baby's nappies. There was no 9/11, no Iraq war, no Brexit and no pandemic.
Now we meet in another country, a Britain barely recognisable. Once he was the future; now the Downing Street flat has been redecorated four times, first for Gordon Brown, who temporarily moved his bed across the way, then for the Camerons with their yellow Scandi sofa. Next came Theresa May with her scented candles and then the £600 scrolling fern wallpaper. Luckily, Cherie didn't like wallpaper. He chuckles.
Yet in some ways Blair, now 68 years old, seems to have stayed the same: the snaggled smile, the call-me-Tony, the open-necked shirt, the hint of a tan, the concerned interest. It's rare for interviewees to ask questions. But when he says, "How are you? How are the kids?" he sounds like he actually means it, although he has never met them. I say my 17-year-old is studying Blair's rise to power for his history A-level. Unoffended, he asks if he can help.
The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Bambi looks craggier now. "No," he doesn't have Botox. He's not pompous; you can talk to him about most things, except maybe sex. Cherie was always more up for that. He is surprisingly prudish compared with his wife, once telling me that he can't watch most TV series as they contain "a large amount of sex". He prefers "action films with happy endings". He's quite old-fashioned for a modernising prime minister, immaculate in his pressed jeans, navy jacket and polished boots. Did he polish them himself? "What do you think?"
Fifteen years on, he comes across as every inch the global statesman as we sit in his glass and chrome office in London. He would never run down the street in a bobble hat and shorts like Boris Johnson: "I prefer the treadmill." He did try the unruly hair look in lockdown. Some thought he appeared distinguished and called him Gandalf; others were horrified by his grey mullet. "Everyone became obsessed by my long hair. It was bizarre."
Since he left office, he has become a more polarising figure than when he was in power. Within hours of the announcement of his new honour, a petition was set up demanding he be stripped of his knighthood. Within a few days it had been signed by more than one million furious people.
It must be hard being so disliked, I suggest. "If I stick my head out of the front door I get a backlash, but nowadays if you go into public life and you are prominent, you have to understand that some people will like you and some will absolutely hate you. It's the way it is." He shrugs. "It didn't surprise me."
But he must find it discombobulating? "There are people who feel genuinely about Iraq and I understand that, and there are people on the far right who hate me partly because I was very vocally against Brexit and partly because I delivered three election victories, I understand that too. And then there are people on the far left who hate me because I delivered three election victories, but from the moderate Labour position."
That's a lot of hating, but he won't apologise for anything. In fact, he politely points out, he is Labour's most successful product. "Even the Attlee and Wilson governments only lasted six years, neither of them won two successive full terms, certainly not three. If you look at 120 years of history of Labour's existence, we have been in power between a quarter and a third of that time and a large chunk of that was New Labour."
Blair is proud of his political career, particularly I assume now that he has watched his successors struggle to last long enough to finish their interiors. But it's hard to find a role as a former prime minister, as David Cameron, who has ended up filling his time playing tennis and golf, has discovered.
Blair doesn't even have hobbies to keep him entertained, looking slightly horrified when I mention the word. Both men have become embroiled in sleaze allegations while attempting to make money after leaving Downing Street. That was his biggest regret, he suggested 18 months ago. He dislikes people thinking he was greedy and he knows he didn't always make the right choices. "It's taken me 15 years to work out how to be a former prime minister.
"There are quite a lot of us now," Blair admits. "The single biggest thing that strikes you when you leave is that this vast infrastructure beneath you when you are prime minister is suddenly absent. There are thousands of people doing your bidding and then, bang, you leave office with just a few people, a mobile phone I'd never used and no office, nothing."
When I last interviewed Blair, two years ago in his country house in Buckinghamshire, we were at the end of the first lockdown and he admitted that he hadn't driven a car since 1979. "I still haven't. I'd need a refresher course." Nor does he cook. "I did make my 21-year-old son Leo an omelette while he was staying." Even in lockdown he didn't wash his own clothes. Did he make his bed? He remains silent. "I always think being in power is a conspiracy to make you as abnormal as possible because of the life you lead."
He bought the mini-Chequers once owned by Sir John Gielgud after he left office and still, I suspect, rather likes having a driver and people to organise his diary and book his flights, but this is not what drove him to set up the non-profit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has more than 400 staff advising 25 countries around the world on policy and governance. What he really wants is influence and to connect with people. "Absolutely. I need to have purpose." He loves discussing ideas, analysing briefing papers and giving advice to everyone from his four children to heads of state, promoting consensus over conflict.
Of course, he admits, "if you become prime minister of the country, you are reasonably ambitious. You could retire and do a few consultancies and the speech circuit, but I could never do that. I wanted to build something."
For years, he has been taken more seriously abroad than in his own country, fêted at Davos, shunned by Dagenham. It was only when the pandemic struck that he seemed to find his voice again in the UK.
People felt that he was talking calm and rational sense while others were panicking. "It would be dishonest to say, when you've stopped being prime minister, that there aren't times when you wish you were back and running everything again," he says. "It can be deeply frustrating. Right from the beginning I could see that Covid was a huge crisis and I wanted to help tackle the pandemic."
As usual, after consulting a plethora of global experts to work out possible strategies, he promoted the middle way. He really is the Goldilocks of politics. Fortress New Zealand he considered too draconian, Sweden too flippant with their refusal to lock down at all. "The countries that have come through it best, although they will have still had a high death toll, have had a combination of vaccination and natural immunity."
Blair's been a vocal advocate of vaccination, even for children, calling anti-vaxxers idiots. "That may have been a bit severe," he now says. "But we recommended children were vaccinated early on and I do think there should be fourth doses, at least for the over-sixties." He would also have introduced a vaccine pass. "It's not about saying this is for ever more, but it can be helpful as an additional tool."
And what about the lockdowns? He would have instigated them, he says, but he would have had simpler guidelines, which became too complex for many – including, it seems, the prime minister. Would he have stuck to them himself if he had been in Downing Street? "Yeah, of course you have to."
He laughs nervously as I list the parties that happened at No 10, the wheelie luggage full of wine ("We didn't have suitcases of alcohol"), the garden parties, the disco in the basement, singing Abba in the flat (he looks as though he might have done that one), the surprise birthday cake. Would he have behaved like that? "Er, I wasn't in No 10 during a lockdown."
Looking back, it's astonishing the hoo-ha that happened over their son Euan going out for a few drinks as a 16-year-old. The Blairs were castigated for their bad parenting. But now it seems everyone is at it. "There wasn't a drinking culture. People didn't, it wasn't… There were solid, capable people. We weren't like that. But the times weren't like that."
The prime minister's wife, Carrie Johnson, gets a lot of the blame for the partying. Cherie was always being criticised for everything, from her choice of clothes to her crystals and rumours of mud baths. "I have a basic rule of leadership that it's always your fault if you are the leader." But he must have felt bad that she took so much of the blame, that she was an easy target. Blair goes into second-person double-negative mode, looking slightly guilty for the first time. "You don't like it, but nowadays no PM is not going to have that scrutiny on their partner."
He had his own psychodrama in No 10 with his neighbour, Gordon Brown, but it never felt quite as vicious or vindictive as the feud between Dominic Cummings and Johnson, I suggest. Does he still see Gordon? "We are in touch from time to time. I still have enormous respect for him." Do they have supper together? "He lives in Scotland." He looks uncomfortable. "It's a perfectly good relationship that is based on the fact we went through a lot together, some good, some bad."
He feels little affinity with the current prime minister over his predicament – but he wouldn't call for his resignation. "That's not a question I can answer. But I do think big changes will happen. A lot of people will not go back [to the office] five days a week. Many have found at-home working more productive in some ways – if I have a stack of meetings, they are far easier to do at home back-to-back on Zoom. It should be about flexibility." That's not exactly what I wanted to know, but again it's the moderate, middle way that feels almost antiquated now in its rational reasonableness.
He does, however, want the prime minister to stop messing around with Peppa Pig, Kermit the frog, rhubarb, using schoolboy humour and pacifying his backbenchers with red meat, and focus instead on the big issues. "We are in danger of going back to the Seventies. Without reliving the pain of Brexit, it was a revolution. Its consequences aren't over. We need to establish a new consensus with Europe and tackle the climate and energy crisis. Then we have the technology revolution that is every bit as far reaching as the Industrial Revolution and we can't get left behind."
Governing, he says, sounding momentarily condescending, "is a serious task that requires hard thought, detail and grip". Blair worries about the looming cost of living crisis. "I think it is very difficult to put up taxes at this time. I can see the necessity in fiscal terms, but you will have corporation tax going up, energy, national insurance. We are still taxing capital and labour a lot. I personally wouldn't do it."
His greatest concern about Boris, however, was that he has no coherent plan or strategy. "You can agree with New Labour or not, but everyone knew what I thought. The same with Margaret Thatcher. Funnily enough, I came across a speech she gave to the UN assembly on climate change in 1989 and it had so much substance and careful argument and you think politicians don't do that any more. You have to hold firm on certain positions. The reason that Russia and China can put us under pressure today is that they think we have lost that capacity to lead, and therefore they think we are essentially decadent in the literal meaning of the word – decaying."
Blair doesn't think he would go into politics if he was a young barrister now and he definitely wouldn't encourage his children to become MPs. "With social media it's brutal. There are so many interesting things you could do; why would you become an MP to be abused? It's worse for women. It's frustrating because we have to produce quality people again. It's not that the US and Britain don't have them, but politics has to be structured in a way that encourages them back. It's not really about money in the end. I think it's much more to do with whether people think they are going to join something where they can really make a difference."
What has made him wince most in the past few years watching from outside Downing Street? He pauses. "Afghanistan was just a serious betrayal, I'm afraid. I understand why people rebelled against the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on, but you know in the end, having done the really difficult part, we were in a place where we could have retained a big enough commitment to have kept the Taliban at bay."
He's also being kept awake by the thought that the Russians may invade Ukraine. "If Russia does this, they have to know they will pay a heavy price and, at the very least, we will do everything we can to arm and help the Ukrainian people. I think it's hard to say what will happen next, but I am struck by the number of people I talk to in the intelligence community who say it is definitely going to happen."
The addiction to politics is still there. He spends a lot of time, he admits, pondering why the centre ground has become so unappealing. "I think if you had a vibrant, modern, forward-looking Labour Party right now, from the centre, it could win an election. The assumption that the centre ground can't win is driven by the noisiness of the social media pile-ons from the left and right. All social media has taught us is that there are a lot crazier people out there than we realised. Years ago, they were at the end of the bar; now they have a platform. But we should just walk round them as we did before."
The relief he feels now Jeremy Corbyn has gone is palpable. "To say seriously to the people of my old constituency of Sedgefield that this guy should be prime minister, they would feel insulted by that – it was a terrible period." What about his successor, Sir Keir Starmer? "He is a work in progress. I think he has done a really good job through the party conference and the reshuffle. The Labour Party has to think that this is a historic moment where, if it really wants to win sustainably, it has to think of itself as a different type of party. Otherwise, it will always just be there to give the Tories a breather."
But this is a different era, he concedes, with new problems. When he was leader, there were no arguments about sex and gender, trans rights and toppling statues. Starmer will have to go into battle over the culture wars, he says. "The polls might say voters don't care but if you dig a little deeper, what they are really saying is we don't like all this stuff that is being shoved at us."
I assume he is going to cite the third way again, but Blair comes down firmly on the side of the author JK Rowling. "They [voters] don't want a situation where women can't talk about being women. I have this conversation quite often with Labour people and I know their inclination is to walk round this issue, but I am telling you to go right into it and resolve it in a way that makes it absolutely clear where you stand. That is how to shut down the Tories on it."
He is risking the ire of the trans lobby now. "Of course, we shouldn't be transphobic and we should have equal rights for trans people. But equal rights doesn't mean you can't use the phrase 'pregnant woman'. If you went to Sedgefield and had that conversation, they would think you were bonkers."
The younger generation, he admits, think differently. "Leo always says to me, 'Don't go there, Dad. There are feelings and there are facts, but right now feelings are more important.' "
He feels the same about no-platforming. "It's ridiculous saying you can't go and talk at a university if you say something I might not agree with. You have to come to common-sense positions on these things and hold firm to them."
Blair's great knack always appeared to be his ability to identify with Middle England. He seemed more normal than former prime ministers, standing there with his mug of tea in his hand. But his childhood was more complicated than he ever admitted. Having covered his first years in power as a political journalist, followed him on numerous road trips and read his autobiography, it wasn't until I talked to him about his early life for the podcast Past Imperfect two years ago that I realised how much he had overcome.
His father was the first success story in his family. A foster child from Glasgow, he became an acclaimed barrister and lecturer – "He even had his own little TV slot," Blair explained. "Then when he was 40 and I was 10 he had this very serious stroke that basically ended his career and completely changed our lives. I remember waking up in the morning and my mother coming in and telling me that my father wasn't well and I immediately realised, the way children have that instinct, that this was much more serious than just he wasn't well. He could only say the words 'good' and 'tea', but nothing else. I remember the headmaster saw me and we said a prayer for him."
His father had to give up on his aspirations to become an MP and dreams of becoming prime minister, and many of their new middle-class friends deserted them. But Blair, as always, likes to put a positive spin on it. "It was the event that shaped my childhood for sure. It definitely disciplined me that life was uncertain. I was quite wayward as a child – if that experience hadn't happened, I might have gone off the rails perfectly easily."
As if that wasn't painful enough, his mother became wrapped up looking after his sister. "My sister was also extremely ill. She had serious rheumatoid arthritis in hospital. Then, when I was 21, my mum died. She was more of a stable presence and she was very kind-natured but quiet. She would have been happy with whatever I did, although she was slightly worried when I started to grow my hair long and get into rock music."
He admits now that it was strange that he rarely mentioned his childhood difficulties while in Downing Street, because they must have influenced him.
"A lot of people go through the whole of their youth and they never really have disturbing events. But when you've had a set of them, then I think you acquire a certain urgency in your desire to fulfil yourself, and certainly not take life for granted."
But he would never have therapy, he told me two years ago. "I just think if you're not careful you get obsessed with introspection and it's also because, in the work I do now, when I go and visit these countries where kids will be growing up in a family where at least one of the siblings has died of a childhood disease and the parents are scraping money together and living day by day, you kind of think the West's desire to be endlessly self-absorbed is not very healthy."
Now he is more blunt. "The problem is, everyone today wants to be a victim. I don't feel like that. I always say to people, the best thing in life is to wake up with a sense of purpose and go to bed counting your blessings. I always think, 'What's the worst that can happen?' OK, the whole thing gets taken away, you're thrown out on the street – you're still alive, you've still got your brain and you've got your family. Life does require a certain sense of urgency and get-up-and-go and you are to a degree on your own, so make the most of it."
His childhood, he insists, was still very happy. "I'm naturally optimistic. My mother was from Ireland originally, we spent time living in Glasgow, we were in Australia for a time, I was bought up in Durham. I've always had a very open view of the world. I never felt I came from any particular class, although I went to private school and was in one sense privileged."
Does he feel guilty that his children have had a tough time in a different way, growing up in the No 10 fishbowl? "I remember a few years back making the mistake of saying at dinner, 'I don't think you guys really had that much hassle as a result of being my kids.' I got a very sharp education in how tough it had been."
His eldest son Euan is now reportedly far richer than his dad, with his tech education start-up, Multiverse, which matches young people with apprenticeships. Nicky is a solicitor, Kathryn a barrister like her mother, and he already has six grandchildren.
"I don't need to pass on money now. All the children can look after themselves. Cherie works too. I don't want a yacht. I don't take a salary at the institute. I like taking holidays but even on holiday I work during the morning. I'm pretty content. I don't want to retire; Henry Kissinger is the role model, in his late nineties and still sharp as a tack."
Yet wherever he goes, people will always point. "It's just the way it is. I always say about fame, there is good and bad about it. I may be hated, but I am also quite liked by some people."
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London
