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Tony Blair has admitted he was a 'Trot' in his younger days, and believed the Labour party wasn't left wing enough.

When the ex-PM first joined the party, after leaving Oxford University in the 1970s, he thought they were the "betrayers of socialism".

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Reflections With Peter Hennessey, Mr Blair said his enthusiasm was fired after picking up a biography of Trotsky after performing at a gig with his student rock band Ugly Rumours.

"When I got back I picked it up and started to read it. And 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 this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create a Russian revolution and change the world.

"It was like a light going on.

(Image: Hulton Archive)

"And 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."

But, he said, it was future wife Cherie Booth who "steered" him to the mainstream.

(Image: AFP)

He said: "The great thing about Cherie is that she’s literally never changed her politics from the first time I met her. She’d complete contempt for the far left then, which was an unusual position for young people.”

And he slammed today’s left for “riding the anger not providing the answers.”

He said: "Post financial crisis, post 9/11, people want change. And the stresses of globalisation culture and economic are severe. But the change has got to be change that’s sensible and modern.

"And the truth is this populism of left and right where the right essentially blame the immigrants and the left go anti-business, I mean this will not produce solutions."

Mr Blair walso revealed how Gordon Brown - with whom he later feuded bitterly when they were both in government - helped him write his first Labour Party conference speech when they were both shadow junior ministers.

"It was a very, if I may say so, very intelligent analysis of what was wrong with Conservative employment law and how we were going to change it. But in terms of a conference speech, it plainly didn't work," he said.

"He said to me, 'Oh my god, you can't say this, it's ridiculous', and then literally sat down and wrote out the first opening lines.

(Image: Getty Images)

"I remember thinking well, he knows more about it than me so I'm just going to go and give it, and then being absolutely astonished at the extraordinary reaction I got from the conference. And after that I thought, yeah, well that's obviously the way to do it."

Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Blair admitted he had had a "gap of understanding" about how Iraq could implode after the war, as a myriad of forces that had been suppressed by Saddam Hussain, "were going to come out and disrupt".