Blair was elected Prime Minister in 1997 with an overwhelming majority. His race against the incumbent Conservative leader John Major triumphantly ended 18 years of Tory domination in the British government. Blair became the youngest person to hold the office for 200 years.

Tony Blair's strategies include the successful pursuit of a resolution for the conflict in Northern Ireland and a more integrated relationship between Britain and the rest of the European Union. During the ethnic conflict in Kosovo in 1999, the British people strongly supported his firm position against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian military. In that campaign, Blair became one of the driving forces behind NATO's air offensive.

His popularity suffered a temporary setback in 2001 during the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic that devastated British livestock and turned into a national crisis. His sweeping victory in the June elections of that year, however, reinstated him as the dominant British leader.

Born in Edinburgh on May 6, 1953, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair grew up in the industrial city of Durham in northern England. In 1980 he married Cherie Booth, also a barrister. They have four children, Euan, Nicky, Kathryn and Leo, who is the first child born to a sitting Prime Minister in 152 years.

Tony Blair attended Edinburgh's prestigious Fettes College from 1966 to 1971, and studied law at St. John's College, Oxford University, from 1972 to 1975. At Oxford he and was the lead singer of a rock band called the Ugly Rumors, and also developed an interest in politics.

While a practicing barrister specializing in employment and industrial law from 1976 to 1983, he became disenchanted with the Labour Party's leadership and some of its prominent objectives, such as the nationalization of industry and the increased power of trade unions. In 1979, British voters, similarly discontented with the Labour government, elected the Conservative Party with Margaret Thatcher at the helm and kept them there until 1997.

Blair's first political victory came in 1983 when he was elected Member of Parliament from Sedgefield, near Durham, where he grew up. He decisively moved away from the socialist ideologies that identified Labour in the late '70s and early '80s. From 1984 to 1987 he was the opposition speaker for Treasury affairs and, from 1987 to 1988, for trade and industry. Elected to Labour's Shadow Cabinet in 1988, he served as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy in the same year, Employment the next year and Home Affairs in 1992. In the latter capacity, Blair took a hard-line position on crime, posing an insurmountable challenge to John Major's Conservative government.

In 1994, almost twenty years after joining the Labour Party, Blair was elected party leader. He redefined many of Labour's traditional goals, mirroring the views of mainstream Britons. Comprehensively restructuring the party and its platform, he coined the phrase "New Labour, New Britain" and brought a fresh emphasis to free enterprise and economic reform. At the end of his first year, many of his programs proved successful. The Labour Party showed a large increase in membership and a strong lead in public-opinion polls. He is today one of the world's most prominent Heads of State.