The hours may be too long to be legal, and the stress is like no other job in politics, but being Britain’s Prime Minister has its rewards, Tony Blair is telling visitors to his official website.
In a show of candor for the public that re-elected his Labour Party to a third straight term last year, Downing Street has put together a ”day in the life of Tony” film, which can be downloaded on www.pm.gov.uk.
Featuring unprecedented footage of an otherwise closed-door Cabinet meeting, the internet snapshot charts Blair’s daily challenges as he pays visits, makes speeches and faces his weekly grilling in Parliament.
Sitting at his desk, Blair says the long hours he works are ”probably not lawful under some directive or other” — an apparent reference to a European Union labour law that limits working weeks to 48 hours.
He also confesses that nothing — not even being leader of the opposition — can truly prepare a politician for the enormity of the most important job in British politics.
”It’s just a completely different order of stress, challenge, pressure,” he says, before insisting that ”getting things done” makes it all worthwhile.
”When you get things done and you see results, and you think, well, that in part happened as a result of something I did, or we did, or decisions that were taken here — that’s what makes everything worthwhile, and it is an enormous privilege to be able to do it,” he says.
The hours evidently make their mark on Blair (52), as the video opens with him saying ”good morning” on a routine official visit — only for him to realise midday has passed him by.
There is no ”typical day”, he says, a point illustrated with footage of Greenpeace activists whose protest at a recent business conference in London forced Blair to switch the venue of a key speech on the environment.
Stressing the need to ”compartmentalise, to be able to switch from one subject into another”, he is shown at his weekly half-hour question period in the House of Commons.
He reveals that Margaret Thatcher, the indefatigable ”iron lady” who was Conservative prime minister in the 1980s, taught him one of the valuable aspects of the regular parliamentary showdown.
”I remember Mrs Thatcher once saying to me that the most important thing about prime minister’s questions is that it gave you the opportunity to know exactly what was going on in all the different nooks and crannies of government,” he says.
Blair concedes that the intense scrutiny he has found himself under as prime minister since 1997 has seen him end up in ”a lot of trouble” when he has not been entirely on top of a subject.
Showing film of his arrival at a monthly press conference at Downing Street, he says: ”The thing about this job is that everything you say is on the record and is then subject to the most minute scrutiny.
”So if, suddenly, you end up getting a fact wrong, or even just get hold of the wrong end of the stick — and it’s happened to me on several occasions — then you can end up in a lot of trouble.
”People then either ascribe meanings to your words that you never intended them to have or you have to go and eat humble pie and say you got it wrong.”
That is why, he added, that whenever he is briefed in the Cabinet room, he insists on ”facts, facts, facts”.
”Get the facts first, because then you can work your way round both the policy and also how you answer difficult questions, but the quality of the research you get is very, very important.” — AFP
