Antiwar Protester Disrupts Inquiry as Blair Testifies

It has been 15 years since Tony Blair entered office as the most popular British prime minister in modern memory, and five years since he left the job in a climate of opprobrium so dire that he opted to virtually disappear from his country’s public life, turning to a life as a richly rewarded world traveler, diplomat and consultant. But if there has been something Nixonian about him, a man fallen from grace at home yet still widely celebrated abroad, Blair marked a comeback of a kind on May 28. Before a judicial inquiry that is examining Rupert Murdoch’s decades of what some saw as shadowy power over the country’s politicians, he rolled out a new model of himself, Tony Blair as the 60-ish, above-the-fray, unflappable elder statesmen. Along the way, Blair, 59, sought to take some of the heat out of the furor surrounding Murdoch, saying that despite bestowing his British newspapers’ backing on the Labour Party before Blair’s breakthrough election in 1997, the media tycoon had never sought to lobby him on issues that affected the commercial success of the Murdoch properties in Britain. Moreover, Blair said, the newspapers’ backing remained steady through two more Labour election victories, although Labour “decided more often against than in favor” on regulatory matters affecting Murdoch’s companies.