Tony Blair has said he flirted with Marxism after reading a biography of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky while studying at Oxford.

The former Labour prime minister said reading about Trotsky and "extraordinary causes and injustices" in the world sparked his interest in politics, and moved him to become "briefly a Trot".

Mr Blair, who moved his party to the centre and called it New Labour, remains a hate figure for many on the left, and has criticised current leader Jeremy Corbyn for being too left-wing.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Reflections With Peter Hennessey, he said the first volume of a Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher was the first political book he read. He picked it up after performing at a gig with his student rock band Ugly Rumours.

"I literally didn't stop reading it all night. It opened a different world to me," he said.


"I suddenly thought the world's full of these extraordinary causes and injustices and here's this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create the Russian revolution and change the world.

"It was like a light going on."

Image: Mr Blair says Cherie quenched his enthusiasm for Marxism

Within about a year, however, Mr Blair said he concluded that the ideology of the Bolshevik leader "wasn't right".

He said that conversations with an Indian student, who warned him about the dangers of an all-powerful state, and the influence of his future wife Cherie Booth, whom he began dating then, quenched his enthusiasm for Marxist ideology.

"She was a sort of mainstream Labour person then and remained that literally all the way through," he said of his future wife.

"That was influential because obviously when we started going out together she was extremely critical of what she regarded as my sort of Oxford student socialism. So she made that very clear."

"Even though over time I obviously left that side of politics behind, the notion of having a cause and a purpose and one bigger than yourself or your own ambition - and I think probably allied at the same time to coming to religious faith - that changed my life in that period," he said.

With his brand of centrist politics, Mr Blair won three consecutive elections and served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007. Ultimately, his legacy was tarnished by his decision to follow George W Bush in the war in Iraq.

Image: Tony Blair became George W Bush's closest ally after 9/11

Mr Blair said he scrutinised his stance "all the time" and insisted that, despite the mistakes that were made, he stands by his decision to go to war and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.

"The thing that is, I think, difficult for people to accept is that I haven't changed my view that it was better that we removed him than not," he said.

Among mistakes made around the conflict, he mentioned a failure to plan for what would happen after Saddam's removal and to understand "the depth of the problem within the world of Islam and the Middle East" in the aftermath of the war.