Blair did God a lot more and a lot earlier than the press realised

Stan Greenberg, who polled for both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, spoke at the RSA earlier this week. In his talk, he revealed that during the 1997 campaign Blair had a separate team of faith advisors whose role it was to check that his politics were in line with his religious beliefs: Here is what Greenberg said, it is 39 minutes in if you want to listen to it for yourself:

‘He had a separate religious group that met weekly during the campaign, the’97 campaign, which he met with weekly. He said that he would talk to them and make sure, kinda check he wasn’t going too far in his politics from his religious faith. But none of those people were introduced into the campaign. But that was a separate domain. After 9/11, he was in some ways liberated to bring together faith and his politics.’

The more you hear about the importance of Blair’s faith to him both personally and politically, the more you realise that the press—with the exception of Matt’s famous Sunday Telegraph collaboration with Blair—vastly underestimated its influence on him.