The son of a barrister, Blair graduated from St. John's College of the University of Oxford in 1975 and was called to the bar the following year. While specializing in employment and commercial law, he became increasingly involved in Labour Party politics and in 1983 was elected to the House of Commons. His entry into politics coincided with a long political ascendancy of the Conservative Party (from 1979) and Labour's loss of four consecutive general elections (from 1979 through 1992).
Entering Labour's shadow cabinet in 1988, Blair became the most outspoken of those party leaders calling for Labour to move to the political centre and deemphasize its traditional advocacy of state control and public ownership of certain sectors of the economy. In 1992 John Smith was elected Labour leader, and he appointed Blair shadow home secretary. After Smith's death in May 1994, Blair was elected the new leader of the Labour Party in July. By mid-1995 he had revamped the Labour Party's platform, obtaining unprecedented commitments to free enterprise, anti-inflationary policies, aggressive crime prevention, and support for Britain's integration into the European Union. Blair summed up his reforms—often opposed by members of his own party—by describing the party as New Labour. Under his leadership, the Labour Party heavily defeated the Conservatives in nationwide municipal elections held in May 1995 and won a landslide victory over the Conservatives in the general election of May 1997. Blair enjoyed a 179-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest majority of any party since 1935. He became the youngest prime minister since 1812.
His government carried out several reforms that had been promised in the party's manifesto but also accepted some Conservative policies that had been implemented in the previous 18 years. His first major initiative—and perhaps his boldest—granted the Bank of England the power to determine interest rates without government consultation—a policy that had not appeared in the party's platform. His government also immediately signed the Treaty on European Union's Social Chapter and turned its attention to brokering a peace agreement between republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland. Blair initiated reforms in the House of Commons, modernizing the format of “Prime Minister's Question Time,” during which the prime minister answers questions from members of Parliament. During his first year in office, he organized referenda that created devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales and developed a joint committee to coordinate constitutional and other policies with the opposition Liberal Democrats.
In May 1998 Blair led a successful referendum campaign to create a new assembly for London and to establish the city's first directly elected mayor. That year Blair also helped to negotiate the Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement), which was ratified overwhelmingly in both Ireland and Northern Ireland and which created an elected devolved power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland for the first time since 1972. Blair also eliminated all but 92 of the hereditary members of the House of Lords as the prelude to more-extensive reforms of that chamber. In 2001 Blair led the Labour Party to a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest-ever second-term majority in British electoral history.
After the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Blair allied the United Kingdom with the United States and its president, George W. Bush, in a global war against terrorism. In early 2003, following passage by the United Nations Security Council of a resolution mandating the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, Blair and Bush tried without success to persuade other Security Council members that continued weapons inspections would not succeed in uncovering any weapons of mass destruction held by the Iraqi government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein. Despite deep divisions within the Labour Party—several ministers resigned and 139 Labour members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion opposing the government's policy—and strong public opposition to a war with Iraq, Blair, with Bush, led a coalition of military forces in an attack on Iraq in March 2003. When military inspectors failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction in the country after the coalition's victory, the Blair government was accused of distorting (“sexing up”) intelligence on which it had based its claim that Iraq was an imminent threat. Notwithstanding lingering public dissatisfaction with Blair's policy in Iraq, Blair led the Labour Party to its third successive general election victory in May 2005.
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