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Diana, princess of Wales, original name Diana Frances Spencer, (born July 1, 1961, Sandringham, Norfolk, England—died August 31, 1997, Paris, France), former consort (1981–96) of Charles, prince of Wales; mother of the heir second in line to the British throne, Prince William, duke of Cambridge (born 1982); and one of the foremost celebrities of her day. (For more on Diana, especially on the effect of her celebrity status, see Britannica’s interview with Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles [2007].)
Diana was born at Park House, the home that her parents rented on Queen Elizabeth II’s estate at Sandringham and where Diana’s childhood playmates were the queen’s younger sons, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. She was the third child and youngest daughter of Edward John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, heir to the 7th Earl Spencer, and his first wife, Frances Ruth Burke Roche (daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy). Her parents’ troubled marriage ended in divorce when Diana was a child, and she, along with her brother and two sisters, remained with her father. She became Lady Diana Spencer when her father succeeded to the earldom in 1975. Riddlesworth Hall (near Thetford, Norfolk) and West Heath School (Sevenoaks, Kent) provided the young Diana’s schooling. After attending the finishing school of Chateau d’Oex at Montreux, Switzerland, Diana returned to England and became a kindergarten assistant at the fashionable Young England school in Pimlico.
She renewed her contacts with the royal family, and her friendship with Charles grew in 1980. On February 24, 1981, their engagement was announced, and her beauty and shy demeanour—which earned her the nickname “Shy Di”—made her an instant sensation with the media and the public. The couple married in St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981, in a globally televised ceremony watched by an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions. Their first child, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, was born on June 21, 1982, and their second, Prince Henry (“Harry”) Charles Albert David, on September 15, 1984.
“Princess Di” rapidly evolved into an icon of grace, elegance, and glamour. Exuding natural charm and charisma, she used her celebrity status to aid numerous charitable causes, and her changing hairstyles and wardrobe made her a fashion trendsetter. Behind the scenes, however, marital difficulties between the princess and prince were growing. Diana struggled with severe postnatal depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and the mounting strain of being constantly pursued by both the official media royal-watchers and the tabloid press, particularly the paparazzi. The marital breakdown became increasingly apparent amid mutual recriminations, tell-all biographies, and admissions of infidelity on both sides, and the couple formally separated in 1992. Diana presented her side in Andrew Morton’s controversial book Diana: Her True Story (1992) and in an unusually candid television interview in 1995. After prolonged negotiations that left Diana with a substantial financial settlement but without the title Her Royal Highness, the couple’s divorce became final on August 28, 1996.
After the divorce, Diana maintained her high public profile and continued many of the activities she had earlier undertaken on behalf of charities, supporting causes as diverse as the arts, children’s issues, and AIDS patients. She also was involved in efforts to ban land mines. To ensure that William and Harry had “an understanding of people’s emotions, their insecurities, people’s distress, and their hopes and dreams,” Diana brought her sons with her to hospitals, homeless shelters, and orphanages. To acquaint them with the world outside royal privilege, she took them to fast food restaurants and on public transportation. Her compassion, personal warmth, humility, and accessibility earned her the sobriquet “the People’s Princess.”
Long one of the most-photographed women in the world, Diana’s unprecedented popularity both in Britain and abroad continued after her divorce. Although she used that celebrity to great effect in promoting her charitable work, the media (in particular the paparazzi) were often intrusive. It was while attempting to evade pursuing journalists that Diana was killed, along with her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, in an automobile accident in a tunnel under the streets of Paris in 1997.
Though the photographers were initially blamed for causing the accident, a French judge in 1999 cleared them of any wrongdoing, instead faulting Paul, who was found to have had a blood alcohol level over the legal limit at the time of the crash and to have taken prescription drugs incompatible with alcohol. In 2006 a Scotland Yard inquiry into the incident also concluded that the driver was at fault. In April 2008, however, a British inquest jury ruled both the driver and the paparazzi guilty of unlawful killing through grossly negligent driving, though it found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill Diana or Fayed, an accusation long made by Fayed’s father.
Her death produced unprecedented expressions of public mourning, testifying to her enormous hold on the British national psyche. The royal family, apparently caught off guard by the extraordinary outpouring of grief and by criticism of their emotional reticence, broke with tradition in arranging the internationally televised royal funeral. The image of Prince William, then age 15, and Prince Harry, then age 12, walking solemnly with their father behind Diana’s casket in her funeral cortege became iconic. At Diana’s funeral Sir Elton John performed a version of his classic song “Candle in the Wind” (originally written about actress Marilyn Monroe) with lyrics that had been revised by his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, to reflect on the life and death of Diana.
Goodbye England’s rose;
May you ever grow in our hearts.
You were the grace that placed yourself
Where lives were torn apart.
The recording of that version of the song became the most successful pop single in history to date, selling more than 30 million copies.
Diana’s life, and her death, polarized national feeling about the existing system of monarchy (and, in a sense, about British identity), which appeared antiquated and unfeeling in a populist age of media celebrity in which Diana herself was a central figure.
Elizabeth II, in full Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, officially Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, (born April 21, 1926, London, England), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from February 6, 1952. In 2015 she surpassed Victoria to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history.
Elizabeth was the elder daughter of Prince Albert, duke of York, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. As the child of a younger son of King George V, the young Elizabeth had little prospect of acceding to the throne until her uncle, Edward VIII (afterward duke of Windsor), abdicated in her father’s favour on December 11, 1936, at which time her father became King George VI and she became heir presumptive. The princess’s education was supervised by her mother, who entrusted her daughters to a governess, Marion Crawford; the princess was also grounded in history by C.H.K. Marten, afterward provost of Eton College, and had instruction from visiting teachers in music and languages. During World War II she and her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, perforce spent much of their time safely away from the London blitz and separated from their parents, living mostly at Balmoral Castle in Scotland and at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, and Windsor Castle.
Early in 1947 Princess Elizabeth went with the king and queen to South Africa. After her return there was an announcement of her betrothal to her distant cousin Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy, formerly Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. The marriage took place in Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947. On the eve of the wedding her father, the king, conferred upon the bridegroom the titles of duke of Edinburgh, earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich. They took residence at Clarence House in London. Their first child, Prince Charles (Charles Philip Arthur George), was born November 14, 1948, at Buckingham Palace.
In the summer of 1951 the health of King George VI entered into a serious decline, and Princess Elizabeth represented him at the Trooping the Colour and on various other state occasions. On October 7 she and her husband set out on a highly successful tour of Canada and Washington, D.C. After Christmas in England she and the duke set out in January 1952 for a tour of Australia and New Zealand, but en route, at Sagana, Kenya, news reached them of the king’s death on February 6, 1952. Elizabeth, now queen, at once flew back to England. The first three months of her reign, the period of full mourning for her father, were passed in comparative seclusion. But in the summer, after she had moved from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, she undertook the routine duties of the sovereign and carried out her first state opening of Parliament on November 4, 1952. Her coronation was held at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.
Beginning in November 1953 the queen and the duke of Edinburgh made a six-month round-the-world tour of the Commonwealth, which included the first visit to Australia and New Zealand by a reigning British monarch. In 1957, after state visits to various European nations, she and the duke visited Canada and the United States. In 1961 she made the first royal British tour of the Indian subcontinent in 50 years, and she was also the first reigning British monarch to visit South America (in 1968) and the Persian Gulf countries (in 1979). During her “Silver Jubilee” in 1977, she presided at a London banquet attended by the leaders of the 36 members of the Commonwealth, traveled all over Britain and Northern Ireland, and toured overseas in the South Pacific and Australia, in Canada, and in the Caribbean.
On the accession of Queen Elizabeth, her son Prince Charles became heir apparent; he was named prince of Wales on July 26, 1958, and was so invested on July 1, 1969. The queen’s other children were Princess Anne (Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise), born August 15, 1950, and created princess royal in 1987; Prince Andrew (Andrew Albert Christian Edward), born February 19, 1960, and created duke of York in 1986; and Prince Edward (Edward Anthony Richard Louis), born March 10, 1964, and created earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn in 1999. All these children have the surname “of Windsor,” but in 1960 Elizabeth decided to create the hyphenated name Mountbatten-Windsor for other descendants not styled prince or princess and royal highness. Elizabeth’s first grandchild (Princess Anne’s son) was born on November 15, 1977.
The queen seemed increasingly aware of the modern role of the monarchy, allowing, for example, the televising of the royal family’s domestic life in 1970 and condoning the formal dissolution of her sister’s marriage in 1978. In the 1990s, however, the royal family faced a number of challenges. In 1992, a year that Elizabeth referred to as the royal family’s annus horribilis, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, princess of Wales, separated, as did Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah, duchess of York. Moreover, Anne divorced, and a fire gutted the royal residence of Windsor Castle. In addition, as the country struggled with a recession, resentment over the royals’ lifestyle mounted, and in 1992 Elizabeth, although personally exempt, agreed to pay taxes on her private income. The separation and later divorce (1996) of Charles and the immensely popular Diana further eroded support for the royal family, which was viewed by some as antiquated and unfeeling. The criticism intensified following Diana’s death in 1997, especially after Elizabeth initially refused to allow the national flag to fly at half-staff over Buckingham Palace. In line with her earlier attempts at modernizing the monarchy, the queen subsequently sought to present a less-stuffy and less-traditional image of the monarchy. These attempts were met with mixed success.
In 2002 Elizabeth celebrated her 50th year on the throne. As part of her “Golden Jubilee,” events were held throughout the Commonwealth, including several days of festivities in London. The celebrations were somewhat diminished by the deaths of Elizabeth’s mother and sister early in the year. Beginning in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, the public standing of the royal family rebounded, and even Charles’s 2005 marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles found much support among the British people. In April 2011 Elizabeth led the family in celebrating the wedding of Prince William of Wales—the elder son of Charles and Diana—and Catherine Middleton. The following month she surpassed George III to become the second longest-reigning monarch in British history, behind Victoria. Also in May, Elizabeth made a historic trip to Ireland, becoming both the first British monarch to visit the Irish republic and the first to set foot in Ireland since 1911. In 2012 Elizabeth celebrated her “Diamond Jubilee,” marking 60 years on the throne. On September 9, 2015, she surpassed Victoria’s record reign of 63 years and 216 days.
Elizabeth is known to favour simplicity in court life and is also known to take a serious and informed interest in government business, aside from the traditional and ceremonial duties. Privately, she became a keen horsewoman; she keeps racehorses, frequently attends races, and periodically visits the Kentucky stud farms in the United States. Her financial and property holdings have made her one of the world’s richest women.
Stephen Frears, in full Stephen Arthur Frears, (born June 20, 1941, Leicester, England), English film and television director known for movies that explore social class through sharply drawn characters.
Frears worked as an assistant director in theatre and film while directing numerous television plays. In 1971 he directed his first feature film, Gumshoe. After more television work, he won acclaim for the gay romance My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which starred a young Daniel Day-Lewis. He continued to garner praise with Prick Up Your Ears (1987), a biographical movie about British playwright Joe Orton, and the American films Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and The Grifters (1990), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He subsequently directed the comedies The Snapper (1993) and The Van (1996), both based on novels by Roddy Doyle, and Mary Reilly (1996), a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Frears received positive notices for High Fidelity (2000), based on Nick Hornby’s comic novel of the same name, and Dirty Pretty Things (2002), about London’s immigrant underworld. For The Queen (2006), which examines the British royal family’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana, Frears was again nominated for an Oscar. His later directorial efforts included Tamara Drewe (2010), a comedy loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, and Lay the Favorite (2012), a comedy-drama set in Las Vegas. Philomena (2013) was based on the true story of a woman searching for a child she gave up for adoption in her youth. The Program (2015) depicts a journalist’s quest to prove that competitive cyclist Lance Armstrong (Ben Foster), who won seven Tour de France titles, was guilty of doping. In 2016 Frears directed Florence Foster Jenkins, which features Meryl Streep in the title role of a delusional socialite who embarks upon an opera career despite a lack of vocal talent. He followed with Victoria and Abdul (2017), about the unlikely friendship between the aging Queen Victoria and her young servant from India, Abdul Karim.
Frears’s additional television work included the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (2000) and the HBO film Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013), a drama involving the legal battle over the boxer’s draft-dodging conviction during the Vietnam War. He later directed the biographical miniseries A Very English Scandal (2018), in which Hugh Grant played the disgraced British politician Jeremy Thorpe, who was accused of conspiring to murder his former lover, Norman Scott. He also directed the comic series State of the Union (2019) and the miniseries Quiz (2020), about a man who cheated his way to the top prize on the TV quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
Tony Blair, in full Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, (born May 6, 1953, Edinburgh, Scotland), British Labour Party leader who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom (1997–2007). He was the youngest prime minister since 1812 and the longest-serving Labour prime minister, and his 10-year tenure as prime minister was the second longest continuous period (after Margaret Thatcher’s) in more than 150 years.
The son of a barrister, Blair attended Fettes College in Edinburgh (a school often viewed as ‘‘Scotland’s Eton’’) and St. John’s College of the University of Oxford, where he combined the study of law with interest in religious ideas and popular music. But he displayed little enthusiasm for politics until he met his future wife, Cherie Booth. He graduated from Oxford in 1975 and was called to the bar the following year. While specializing in employment and commercial law, he became increasingly involved in Labour Party politics and in 1983 was elected to the House of Commons to the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Sedgefield, a tight-knit former mining district in northeastern England. His entry into politics coincided with a long political ascendancy of the Conservative Party (from 1979) and Labour’s loss of four consecutive general elections (from 1979 through 1992).
Entering Labour’s shadow cabinet in 1988, Blair became the most outspoken of those party leaders calling for Labour to move to the political centre and deemphasize its traditional advocacy of state control and public ownership of certain sectors of the economy. In 1992 John Smith was elected Labour leader, and he appointed Blair shadow home secretary. When Smith died suddenly in May 1994, Blair seized the opportunity, and in July he was elected party leader with 57 percent support. His election came as something of a surprise because many believed the post would go to Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, who had partnered with Blair in an attempt to move Labour to the political centre; however, Blair’s stock within the party had risen, and Brown had reluctantly agreed to step aside, though not before the two had come to an understanding that Blair would back Brown as his eventual successor. By mid-1995 Blair had revamped the Labour Party’s platform. He abandoned the party’s stated commitment to the nationalization of the economy (by waging a successful battle to have the party modify its constitution’s Clause IV, which committed the party to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange”), reduced links with trade unions, and obtained unprecedented commitments to free enterprise, anti-inflationary policies, aggressive crime prevention, and support for Britain’s integration into the European Union (EU). Blair summed up his reforms—often opposed by members of his own party—by describing the party as New Labour. Under his leadership, the Labour Party heavily defeated the Conservatives in nationwide municipal elections held in May 1995 and won a landslide victory over the Conservatives in the general election of May 1997, having waged a campaign that centred on the promise that “things can only get better.”
Blair enjoyed a 179-seat majority in the House of Commons—the biggest parliamentary majority in the history of the Labour Party and the largest majority of any party since 1935. Inspired by sociologist Anthony Giddens, he described his philosophy of government as the “Third Way.” Blair claimed that his policies were designed to enable social democracy to respond to the challenges of the worldwide market economy and to equip citizens to cope with what Giddens called “the major revolutions of our time,” including globalization. Perhaps the most coherent view about Blair’s search for the Third Way was that it was an endeavour to discover a form of progressive politics distinguishing itself from the conservatism of both left and right. Blair frequently looked for advice from businessmen who had come to prominence earlier, under the Conservative prime minister Thatcher. Private firms were given an important role in financing state infrastructure projects, despite widespread criticism that this financing was on terms often disadvantageous to the taxpayer.
Blair gave control of the economic agenda to Gordon Brown, his chancellor of the Exchequer and eventual successor. The Blair government’s first major initiative—and perhaps its boldest—granted the Bank of England the power to determine interest rates without government consultation, a policy that had not appeared in the party’s platform. The government also immediately signed the Maastricht Treaty’s Social Chapter and turned its attention to brokering a peace agreement between republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland. Blair initiated reforms in the House of Commons, modernizing the format of “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” during which the prime minister answers questions from members of Parliament. During his first year in office, he organized referenda that created devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales and developed a joint committee to coordinate constitutional and other policies with the opposition Liberal Democrats.
Blair also gave important powers to unelected advisers, notably media consultant Alistair Campbell. The marketing image they adopted, known as “Cool Britannia,” suggested that Britain was a dynamic and successful country that had reinvented itself after years of decline and internal division. New Labour eagerly sought the approval of the mass-circulation press, particularly conservative tabloids such as The Sun, by embracing celebrity culture as well as respect for traditions, including the monarchy.
In May 1998 Blair led a successful referendum campaign to create a new assembly for London and to establish the city’s first directly elected mayor. That year Blair also helped to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), which was ratified overwhelmingly in both Ireland and Northern Ireland and which created an elected devolved power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland for the first time since 1972. Blair also eliminated all but 92 of the hereditary members of the House of Lords as the prelude to more-extensive reforms of that chamber.
The population began to grow skeptical of Blair as a new election approached, as it became clear that his government remained highly centralized and that he had no plans for overdue reforms in the public services. Opinion polls found that there was public concern regarding financial misbehaviour in government, manipulation of the media, the granting of honours to individuals who contributed to Labour Party funds, nepotism, and other actions that put the interests of business before ordinary citizens.
Facing a deeply unpopular opposition, however, Blair was easily reelected in May 2001 to a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest-ever second-term majority in British electoral history, though voter turnout was the lowest since 1918. His second term was dominated by international affairs. In the late 1990s he had won praise by mounting peacekeeping operations in the Serbian province of Kosovo and in Sierra Leone. After the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Britain played a key role in forming an international coalition that succeeded in driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, which had been allowed to become a safe haven for Islamic militants such as Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks. Blair enjoyed a good relationship with U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and allied the United Kingdom with the United States in a global “war against terrorism.” In early 2003, following passage by the United Nations Security Council of a resolution mandating the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, Blair and Bush tried without success to persuade other Security Council members that continued weapons inspections would not succeed in uncovering any weapons of mass destruction held by the Iraqi government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein.
Despite deep divisions within the Labour Party—several ministers resigned and 139 Labour members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion opposing the government’s policy—and strong public opposition to a war with Iraq, Blair, with Bush, led a coalition of military forces in an attack on Iraq in March 2003. Blair’s enthusiastic support for the action damaged his reputation as a global statesman, and he fell out with key European allies. When military inspectors failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction, the Blair government was accused of distorting (“sexing up”) intelligence on which it had based its claim that Iraq was an imminent threat. In October 2004 Blair announced that he would seek a third term as prime minister but would not stand for a fourth term.
Despite lingering public dissatisfaction with Blair’s policy in Iraq, Blair led the Labour Party to its third successive general election victory in May 2005, albeit with a sharply reduced majority. Simmering revolt in the Labour Party over both Iraq and Blair’s rejection of core Labour policies led him to promise that he would resign before the next election. Blair’s popularity, with both the general public and the Labour members of Parliament, generally declined after the election. Many people in Britain felt that the country was in the grip of a serious malaise. Social cohesion seemed to be collapsing in much of urban Britain, as shown by a steep rise in violent crime and open drug dealing. Public officials in the police, civil service, and education sectors seemed to be unable to grapple effectively with the social crisis as they struggled to meet bureaucratic targets. After Islamic extremists exploded bombs in London on July 7, 2005, killing 54 people, Blair began to emphasize the need for a common public culture, and former multicultural policies that encouraged ethnic groups to separate into different communities were repudiated.
Blair’s government suffered its first defeat in the House of Commons in November 2005, when 49 Labour members of Parliament joined the opposition in voting against antiterrorist laws that would have extended the length of time suspects could be held without charge. Subsequently, many Labour members of Parliament called for Blair to announce a date for his departure as prime minister well before the next general election; following a series of resignations by junior ministers, Blair declared in September 2006 that he would stand down as prime minister within a year. On May 10, 2007—one week after Labour was defeated by the Scottish National Party in elections to the Scottish Parliament and suffered major defeats in English local elections as well and two days after devolved power was returned from London to a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland—Blair announced that he would officially tender his resignation as prime minister on June 27, 2007. Blair subsequently was succeeded as leader of the Labour Party and as prime minister by his long-serving chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.
Blair’s decade in office was marked by uninterrupted economic growth and a more independent Bank of England. Blair also preserved much of Thatcher’s market radicalism while managing to place greater emphasis on social justice. Numerous minority groups found his government more sympathetic to their concerns—notably gays, who by 2004 were allowed to enter into civil partnerships recognized by the law. Many believed, however, that Blair’s role in restoring peace to Northern Ireland would come to be seen as his most enduring political legacy. Blair showed a remarkable ability to convey optimism and energy in the face of adversity caused not least by the failure in Iraq.
Critics of his record argued that, instead of using his parliamentary majority to reform the institutions of state, he pursued incoherent short-term policies that left Britain ill-governed in important areas. The state became more intrusive and even more authoritarian without managing to overcome a range of social ills, particularly rising crime and drug use. The economy grew steadily, but it was burdened by low productivity and growing volumes of personal and state debt. Citizens were heavily taxed, and Britain lost much of its remaining manufacturing base, becoming more dependent on financial services and low-skilled sectors for progress. Blair allowed millions of mainly low-skilled migrant workers to settle in the country, and he was criticized for leaving the economy more exposed to the forces of globalization than that of any other large Western country. The biggest cloud hanging over his reputation was the failure to ensure that British involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in policies capable of preventing that country from becoming a source of instability in the Middle East. History could judge his premiership more kindly in the future. However, at the time that he stepped down, Blair was widely viewed as a lucky politician with exceptional talents that enabled him to be a successful vote winner but ultimately lacking the ability to be a noteworthy reformer at home or a stabilizing force in a world facing the resurgence of dangerous divisions.
Nonetheless, after 10 years in office but still only in his early 50s, Blair was not ready to retire from the world scene. On the day of his resignation in 2007, he announced that he would resign his seat in the House of Commons, and he was selected by the “Quartet”—the United States, the EU, Russia, and the United Nations—to serve as special envoy to the Middle East; he held the post until 2015.
Blair made headlines in December 2007 when he converted to Roman Catholicism (Britain has never had a Roman Catholic prime minister). Before his conversion, he had publicly maintained silence on matters of personal faith, but by 2008 he had demonstrated a deep commitment to initiatives aimed at fostering interfaith cooperation globally.
In 2010 Blair published his memoir, A Journey, in which he reasserted his support for the Iraq War and described his strained relationship with Gordon Brown.
In July 2016 Blair’s actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War and his stewardship of Britain’s involvement in the conflict came under withering criticism with the release of the Chilcot Report, the findings of a seven-year inquiry into Britain’s role in the war (including the decision to go to war, whether troops had been adequately prepared, and planning for the war’s aftermath). The inquiry was launched in 2009 by Prime Minister Brown and led by Sir John Chilcot, a career civil servant. Evidence was provided by about 150 witnesses—including Blair, who testified twice—and some 150,000 documents, among which were communications between Blair and Bush. While the 2.6 million-word report did not provide any judgments on Blair’s legal culpability for the conduct of the war, it concluded that he had guided Britain into a military invasion of Iraq before all peaceful options for Iraqi disarmament had been exhausted.
In presenting the report, Chilcot said that the judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been “presented with a certainty that was not justified.” Moreover, the inquiry found that despite explicit warnings, the Blair government had underestimated the consequences of the invasion and that its planning and preparations for postwar Iraq were “wholly inadequate.” The report also presented a picture of Blair’s overestimating his ability to influence Bush and of Blair’s willingness to take Britain to war beside the United States despite his failure to alert Bush to the difficulties posed by the war and his inability to persuade the U.S. president of the necessity of full UN Security Council approval of the invasion,
Responding to the report shortly after its release, Blair claimed that it made clear that he had not made any “secret commitment to war” with Bush and that it “should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit.” “Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein,” he added, “I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country.”
In March 2017 Blair announced his intention to again become involved in the world of politics with the founding of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which he said was intended to function as a “new policy platform to refill the wide open space in the middle of politics.” Blair insisted that he intended neither to form a new political party nor to personally return to frontline politics, but he was critical of both “authoritarian populism” and the leftward direction in which the Labour Party had been taken by Jeremy Corbyn, who had replaced Brown’s successor, Ed Miliband, as leader. In September the new institute published a policy paper outlining steps that the British government could undertake to impose new restrictions on immigration that would not require Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (“Brexit”).
In February 2016, in an attempt to placate the vocal faction of Euroskeptics within his own party as well those voters who had turned to the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron negotiated with the European Council on reforms to British membership in the EU. Having won what he deemed to be sufficient concessions from the council, Cameron then scheduled a national referendum for June 23, 2016, on whether Britain should withdraw from the EU. British voters shocked the world by voting in favour of exiting the EU. Cameron resigned, and the government of new Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May began negotiations with the EU (mandated to be completed by the end of March 2019) on the terms of Britain’s departure. As Parliament debated the details of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill in September 2017, Blair raised the possibility of pulling the plug on Brexit:
Charles, prince of Wales, in full Charles Philip Arthur George, prince of Wales and earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall, duke of Rothesay, earl of Carrick and Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, (born November 14, 1948, Buckingham Palace, London, England), heir apparent to the British throne, eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh.
After private schooling at Buckingham Palace and in London, Hampshire, and Scotland, Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1967. He took a bachelor’s degree there in 1971, the first ever earned by an heir to the British crown. He also spent a term at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, learning Welsh in preparation for his investiture as prince of Wales on July 1, 1969, at Caernarvon Castle. He then attended the Royal Air Force College (becoming an excellent flier) and the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and from 1971 to 1976 took a tour of duty with the Royal Navy. Later he became an outspoken critic of modern architecture. He expressed his views on the topic in A Vision of Britain (1989). In 1992 he founded the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, which later evolved into the BRE Trust, an organization involved with urban regeneration and development projects.
On July 29, 1981, Charles married Lady Diana Frances Spencer (see Diana, princess of Wales), daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer; the royal wedding was a global media event, broadcast live on television and watched by hundreds of millions of people. The couple’s first child, Prince William of Wales, became at his birth (June 21, 1982) second in line of succession to the throne. Their second child, Prince Henry Charles Albert David (known as Harry), was born on September 15, 1984. Charles’s marriage to Diana gradually grew strained amid intense scrutiny from the tabloid press and rumours of infidelity. On December 9, 1992, it was announced that Charles and Diana had decided to separate but would continue to fulfill their public duties and to share the responsibility of raising their sons. The couple divorced on August 28, 1996. A year later Diana died in an auto accident, and popular feeling for her, stronger even in death than in life, served to jeopardize the traditional form of monarchy that Charles represented. He subsequently spent much effort in modernizing his public image as the heir apparent. On April 9, 2005, he married Camilla Parker Bowles (born 1947), with whom he had a long-standing relationship; after the wedding, Parker Bowles took the title of duchess of Cornwall.
Information sourced from Encyclopedia Britannica
