In recent years, though, students have been much more interested in how he was such a good prime minister. They want to know how he improved public services, how he communicated optimism, and how he won elections and kept winning them. <\/p>\n
Yet Waldman succeeded, I think, because he painted a fuller portrait than most have done. This was despite his subject resisting the probing of his inner life more bluntly than I have seen before. <\/p>\n
Blair told Waldman<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s very important to understand about me that I\u2019m not into psychoanalysis. There\u2019s far too much of it and people spend far too long constantly analysing why they do what they do. I know why I do what I do, because I believe in it. If people don\u2019t accept that, I\u2019ll just get on with doing it.\u201d <\/p>\n Others can speculate, however, about the influence of his father, Leo<\/a>, adopted by working-class parents in Glasgow, who became a barrister and law lecturer, was active in politics and wanted to become an MP. Leo was a Conservative, having renounced the Communism of his youth and becoming a proto-Thatcherite in the early 1960s. <\/p>\n When his ambition was thwarted by a stroke, it may have been taken up by Tony, aged 11, although he both rebelled against his father, adopting a politics of the compassionate left, and wanted to succeed on his behalf. The other thing his father gave him, though, was an instinctive understanding of the \u201cstand on your own two feet\u201d mantra of Margaret Thatcher, when she laid waste to the Labour Party in the 1980s. <\/p>\n By chance, Charles Moore, Thatcher\u2019s biographer, came to talk to our students at King\u2019s yesterday, and said that she was just as resistant as Blair to questions about her early life and motivations \u2013 although she deflected them in a different way. When he asked her about her mother, with whom she had an emotionally distant relationship<\/a>, Thatcher said she did wonderful voluntary work: \u201cAnd that\u2019s the thing about the women of Britain. They do marvellous voluntary work, not like the French women.\u201d Moore said: \u201cAnd off she went into a generalisation which she was happier with, rather than the particular about herself.\u201d<\/p>\n Waldman\u2019s questions about what Blair thought about \u201cin the middle of the night\u201d were met with a more knowing deflection. When Blair said he wouldn\u2019t answer that question, Waldman protested: \u201cWhy not, you\u2019re no longer a politician?\u201d Blair said, \u201cYou\u2019re always a politician.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n And it is true in his case that he is still active in politics in the broader sense. This week, he attended the first meeting of Donald Trump\u2019s Board of Peace<\/a> to try to find a way forward for Gaza. As his daughter Kathryn says in the documentary: \u201cHe\u2019s just not finished.\u201d<\/p>\n It is the first time that Kathryn has been interviewed about her father, and the footage of her, brothers Euan and Leo and mother Cherie is the most valuable part of the film. They confirm that the Blair family was not just a public relations exercise, with Blair the first prime minister of the TV age to have young children in Downing Street. They are a real family. <\/p>\n Once, when I was having an off-the-record conversation with Blair in his No 10 office, the prime minister\u2019s great thoughts were interrupted by Leo, aged four, coming to say goodnight. Two decades later, Leo is now being interviewed on TV about what it was like growing up in Downing Street for the first seven years of his life. He said, \u201cI remember being very sad\u201d when the family had to move out in 2007.<\/p>\n![\"\u2018When](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/77223_The-Tony-Blair-Story-10.jpeg\")
\u2018When Blair said he wouldn\u2019t answer that question, Waldman protested: \u201cWhy not, you\u2019re no longer a politician?\u201d Blair said, \u201cYou\u2019re always a politician.\u201d\u2019 (72 Films)<\/p>\n