Whatever your opinion towards former British prime minister Tony Blair, it cannot be denied that he managed to transform the Labour party in the late ‘90s. With the help of spin doctors like Alastair Campbell, he propelled his party to stratospheric success in 1997’s general election and led the country into its ‘Cool Britannia’ era.
This period is covered in the current and final series of The Crown, which opens with a moment that might knock Ghost Diana of its pedestal as the show’s weirdest moment. It shows the Queen suffering a fever dream that sees Blair anointed as King Tony (shout out to the choir soundtracking this mad montage with their choral version of D:REAM).
The Queen would have been more than aware of the powerful pull of Blair – slightly threatened by it, the show seems to suggest – but in episode six, Ruritania, we see the Queen asking Blair to apply a little bit of his marketing magic to the royal family and create a PR plan to improve their reputation. Did this really happen? Or, like with the dream, is it all a figment of Peter Morgan’s imagination?
The meetings
When Blair came into power in 1997 – taking over from John Major – his weekly one-on-one meetings with the Queen also began.
But Blair came under fire in 2010 when he released his autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life, in which he revealed some details about the sit-downs. The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan accused Blair of stealing a line from his 2006, The Queen, when Blair and the royal met for the first time: “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born”, which Blair also quoted word for word as her first greeting to him. Blair also said in his book that he felt he was being put in his place: “So I got a sense of my, er, my relative seniority, or lack of it.”
As per The New York Times, Morgan said: “There are three possibilities. The first is I guessed absolutely perfectly, which is highly unlikely; the second is Blair decided to endorse what I imagined as the official line; and the third is that he had one gin and tonic too many and confused the scene in the film with what had actually happened, and this I find amusing because he always insisted he had never even seen it.”
Blair also claimed that in their meetings, HRH had apparently told him “lessons had to be learnt” from the way things had been handled after Princess Diana’s death. While there’s no official line that the Queen asked him to create a PR campaign – with the help of his wife, Cherie, as shown in the series – Blair told the Today programme in 2022 that the Queen picked up on the fact she needed to address the nation after Diana’s death and the change in tact needed all by herself. “She really didn’t need me to tell her. She sensed it, and then she responded. And when she responded, she responded perfectly. She got the tone absolutely right.”
The fact that Blair had dubbed Diana the “People’s Princess” supposedly irked the late royal, and a few years later, the Queen and Prince Philip were apparently forced to spend the turn of the millennium with Tony and Cherie Blair in an awkward public-facing party. In Tina Brown’s book The Palace Papers, she mentions their disdain for this event and explained: “The royal couple were not fans of Blair at the best of times,” adding that Blair, following Diana’s death, “made much-publicised efforts to mediate her [the Queen’s] response to popular feeling overly inflated”. Brown also states that with Blair’s nickname for Diana, he claimed to have “saved the reputation of the monarchy”.
It’s highly unlikely that a PR plan was pulled together by Blair, New Labour and his team for the Queen. And following her death in 2022, The Sunday Times claimed that the Queen had once let her true feelings about Blair slip. According to the publication, a senior French diplomat once asked her who her favourite Prime Minister was. “That’s not the right question,” she reportedly said, “what you should ask me is who has been my least favourite”, then revealed the answer was Tony Blair.
Blair, meanwhile, has been outspoken on his fictionalised appearance in the final series of The Crown, with a spokesperson for him dubbing it “complete and utter rubbish.”
