I didn’t really enjoy being prime minister, Tony Blair admits

Tony Blair admitted he didn’t enjoy being prime minister in a new documentary about his life.

Sir Tony, who was ranked 10th for 10 years from 1997 to 2007, told the Channel 4 programme: “If I’m really honest about it, I’m not sure I enjoyed it that much.

“I was thinking, here you are in your early 40s, you’re the prime minister.

“And instead of thinking, you’re the prime minister – wow! And I said, ‘You’re the prime minister – so you better do a good job because now it’s up to you what happens to this country and its people.’

In the three-part series, which will be broadcast on Tuesday, February 17, his wife Cherie Blair also said that the former prime minister was a better politician than a husband and that he had never bought her flowers.

“He’s a fantastic politician. As a wife and as a human being, that’s a different matter, but that’s really between me and him,” she said.

“Tony’s not very romantic. For example, he’s never bought me flowers. Now he says, ‘If I buy you flowers, you’ll be very suspicious,’ which is probably true.”

Lady Blair also told how Sir Tony’s decision to involve Britain in the Iraq War in 2003 affected her family.

“You could hear the protests at 10 Downing Street,” he said. “It was a very strange time. I think it was hard for me. [teenage] The kids would come in every day and people would stand there and call their father a murderer and a liar.

“I don’t know how I would have felt if I had been there instead of 10 Downing Street, but how I would have felt when Tony said that Saddam Hussein had these weapons of mass destruction, which he firmly believed.

“He told me that was the case. I know for a fact that he thought it was true.”

Meanwhile, Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, said in the documentary that entering Iraq was a “mistake”.

“Going into Iraq was a mistake from the very beginning,” he said.

“He was one of the best-equipped people we have had personally, politically and mentally as prime minister in the last seventy years, but his ambition and his commitment to the alliance with the Americans led him down a path in Iraq where he basically overdid it, we overdid it as a country, and strategically it was not a success.”

In the documentary, Lady Blair was also seen denying accusations that she was a “Lady Macbeth” figure in Sir Tony’s premiership.

When asked about the accusations, he said: “I guess really? I thought it was a joke. I thought it was Gordon.” [Brown] who identified me as Lady Macbeth.

“If anyone thinks Tony is my puppet, they don’t understand the nature of this man.”