Tony Blair has admitted he did not enjoy being prime minister in a new documentary about his life.
Sir Tony, who was in No 10 from 1997 to 2007, told the Channel 4 programme: “If I’m really honest about it, I’m not sure I did enjoy it that much.
“I was just thinking, here you are in your early 40s, you’re prime minister.
“And rather than thinking, you’re prime minister – wow. I was like, you’re prime minister – so you better do a good job because now what happens to this country and its people depends on you.”
The three-part series, which will air on Tuesday, also saw his wife, Cherie Blair, say the former prime minister made a better politician than a husband and has never bought her flowers.
“He is an amazing politician. As a husband 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. He’s never bought me flowers, for example. And now he says, ‘Well, if I bought you flowers, you’d be very suspicious’, which is probably true.”
Lady Blair also spoke about how Sir Tony’s decision to take the UK into the Iraq War in 2003 impacted her family.
“You could hear the protests in 10 Downing Street,” she said. “It was a very strange time. I think it was hard for my [teenage] children to come in every day and people were standing there calling their father a murderer and a liar.
“I don’t know what I would have felt if I was out there rather than in 10 Downing Street but what I did know was that when Tony said, as he absolutely believed, that Saddam Hussein had these weapons of mass destruction.
“He told me that was the case. I absolutely know that that’s what he thought was true.”
Meanwhile, former head of MI6 Sir John Sawers told the documentary that going into Iraq was a “mistake”.
“It was a mistake that we went into Iraq in the first place,” he said.
“He was personally, politically, mentally one of the best equipped people we’ve had as prime minister over the last seventy years, but his passion and his commitment to the alliance with the Americans led him down a road in Iraq where, basically, he overreached, we as a country overreached, and strategically it has not been a success.”
The documentary also saw Lady Blair reject accusations that she was a “Lady Macbeth” figure in Sir Tony’s premiership.
Asked about the accusations, she said: “I think, really? I thought that was a joke. I thought it was Gordon [Brown] who described me as Lady Macbeth.
“If anyone thinks Tony’s my puppet, they just don’t understand the nature of the man.”
