‘Sir’ Tony Blair; A history of the present
Giving someone who was Prime Minister 15 years ago a Knighthood wouldn’t normally excite a great deal of comment. They are after all ‘yesterday’s men and women’. That is not the case with Tony Blair who has accepted a Knighthood in the New Year’s Honours. This is primarily because Blair has a group of supporters who believe, as he possibly also does, that the ideas he worked out in the mid-1990s which became known as ‘New Labour’ are just the thing not only Britain but the world needs in the 2020s. People can take their own view on that.
The history of Blair and honours is an interesting one. There are of course those who argue that he should stand trial at the Hague for the Iraq War and not get a Knighthood at all. However if one checks who the British State has given Knighthoods to down the years it can be seen that the two are far from mutually exclusive.
Blair wanted to modernise or reform the Honours system when he was PM and a long running investigation resulted in more honours going to people who were actually doing something of note rather than getting them because of the position they held. It was a change but like so much of New Labour not much of one.
In 2006 he was interviewed by police three times in a Cash for Honours inquiry and nothing further was done. That did however underline what successive Governments including the present have used the Honours system for.
When Blair stepped down as PM in 1997 he said he did not want a Knighthood. He did not get the offer anyway. According to some media reports one reason was because the Queen remained unhappy at his, again modest, efforts to drag the Monarchy into the modern era after the death of Princess Diana. Given the current Prince Andrew issue, perhaps they should have paid more attention to Blair, or Sir Tony as he now is….
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