On May 2, 1997, Tony Blair won landslide Labour victory when he moved into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. Prince Charles, “like every powerbroker, was in awe of the conjurer of those arts, Tony Blair”, writes biographer Tom Bower in “Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles”. The Prince of Wales and Mr Blair had first met at a dinner in 1995 at St James's Palace.
Mr Bower wrote in the 2018 biography, “Blair was hardly a passionate royalist”.
The book explains that only the previous year, he advocated a “smaller, Scandinavian-type-monarchy, curbing the rights of the royal family to engage in public controversy”.
Mr Blair suggested the Queen needed to decide whether the monarchy should “retreat into isolation and the old hierarchical order, or seek to become more like a normal family”.
According to the author, the former Prime Minister’s ideas were "popular in the Labour party” but was criticised by the Prince of Wales for “seeking to transform” the royal family into something “more pompous and harder to approach”.
Tony Blair was criticised by Prince Charles for seeking to transform the royal family (Image:
