Blairland

On 1 May 1997 voters woke up to the news that Tony Blair had won a landslide election victory. Blair swept into Drowning Street and transformed Britain. On the thirtieth anniversary of that victory, his former speechwriter Philip Collins looks back and tells the story of the world Blair's government inherited, shaped - and ultimately lost.

Blairland is the tale of a nation coming out of the shadow of the Thatcher years and in transition: from Cool Britannia to the Iraq War, from the Spice Girls to the rise of the internet, from regenerated city centres to forgotten seaside towns. Drawing on Collins's first-hand experience in Downing Street, interviews with key figures and the intimate testimony of ordinary Britons captured in Mass Observation archives this book recovers the spirit of a vanished era.

Collins takes the reader beyond Westminster to the high streets and the living rooms of Britain, where history was felt rather than made. Blairland is a portrait of an era that is now lost: Britain's last age of shared national culture and the last years of analogue.