Cherie Blair blasts Claire Short overTony Tory claims

Jun 21 2009 by Kat Keogh, Sunday Mercury

Cherie also spoke about her own Labour background and said her husband had chosen the Labour Party despite his father Leo’s Communist and later Conservative leanings.

She said: “I come from a family which would be a ‘Labour’ family, but Tony’s father, though of course he’d started off as a young Communist in Glasgow in the 1930s, ended up as a prospective Parliamentary Tory Party candidate.

“So Tony actually chose the Labour Party because he believed in it and I believe in it too. But I had come through to it because of a family background which was naturally inclined to be Labour.”

Born in 1923, Blair’s father Leo was the illegitimate son of middle-class travelling entertainers Celia Ridgeway and Charles Parsons. But their busy schedules saw them hand over their child to poor Clydesdale ship worker James Blair and his wife Mary, who they had met while on tour in Glasgow.

In 1927 Leo’s biological parents tried to reclaim him, but Mary refused and barred young Leo from having any contact with them – although he was later reunited with half-sister Pauline.

Leo later followed his adoptive mum into politics and worked as a copy boy on the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker when he left school.

He was also secretary of the Scottish Young Communist League from 1938 to 1941 but joined the Conservative Party after World War Two.

Leo’s own political career ended when he suffered a stroke when Tony was 11.