Tony or Anthony?

My habit of referring to our former Prime Minister as ‘Anthony Blair’ has a strange power to annoy people (though not as much as my former practice of calling him ‘Princess Tony’, which I did as punishment for his claim - scripted by Alastair Campbell -  that Princess Diana was ‘the People’s Princess’. And also because it seemed to me that he was in so many ways the New Diana. I abandoned ‘Princess Tony’ after he took to bombing civilians from the air, and it seemed too frivolous a jeer at a man who was actively doing violent harm).

But, while it is sometimes a pleasure to annoy certain sorts of people,  it is simply a statement of fact.  Anthony is his name. At least, it was his name when his wife, Cherie, mentioned him in her election leaflet when she stood for Parliament in Thanet North in 1983. Not merely did she call him ‘The barrister, Anthony Blair’. She later spoke at a large meeting in Margate, at which her father, Tony Booth, and her then hero, Tony Benn, were on the platform (and her husband was humbly seated in the audience) of the ‘two Tonys’ who had influenced her in her path to socialism, or some such phrase. The two Tonys were Benn and Booth. Her husband was in any case an Anthony. So she knew the difference between ‘Tony’ and ‘Anthony’, and must presumably have asked him how he’d like to be described in her leaflet. One day I’ll tell the story of my struggle to get hold of that leaflet, during which I discovered that Mrs Blair/Ms Booth had apparently stood for parliament *in private* and it was quite wicked and rude of me to make enquiries about her campaign

When Cherie was selected for Thanet North, her husband hadn’t been picked by any constituency anywhere and, according to the official myth, which is so full of holes you could use it as a colander, had almost despaired of getting a seat. He then, amazingly, was selected for one of the safest seats in the country at the last minute, effortlessly defeating that consummate in-fighter Les Huckfield, a former Minister, despite himself being a privately-educated no-account lawyer with no connections at all with Sedgefield, who had polled so badly I think he lost his deposit in the only by-election he had ever fought (see below).

If you believe that version of his selection, you will believe anything, and you will demonstrate that you know nothing whatever about the Labour party and how it works, but it remains the official version, in both major biographies, trotted out by political journalists as if it were gospel. 

For in 1982 he had fought, and spectacularly failed to win, the safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election. I have just got out the cuttings. In some reports he is referred to as ‘Anthony Blair” and in others as ‘Tony’.  The Times Guide to the House of Commons, in its summary of by-elections during that Parliament, lists him simply as ‘A.Blair’.  I would be interested to see any of his election leaflets from that time. He was cruelly picked on by the Daily Telegraph’s waspish sketch-writer Godfrey Barker, who describes him making a huge fool of himself over strikes by health service workers, and calls him ‘Anthony’ throughout. Mr Barker also spotted something interesting about him, and called him ‘mysterious’ . Which he was, and is, and will be till a proper critical biography is eventually written.

What is interesting is that whenever the Blair machine wanted to get a favoured candidate into Parliament via a safe seat, they always parachuted him into the constituency at the very last minute. I wonder where they got that idea from?