Tony Blair Net Worth – What are the latest reports?
Sir Tony Blair served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007. He is the only Labour leader in the party’s 100-year history to win three consecutive General Elections.
Sir Tony Blair is said to have earned well after leaving Downing Street, and was once fated as one of the highest paid public speakers in the world. Blair has been reportedly known to charge £200,000 for a single speaking event in the past.
A year after leaving office, Mr Blair took on a part-time role as adviser to the Wall Street investment bank JP Morgan which was reported to have earned him £2 million per year. He also took an advisory role with Zurich Financial Services.
Accounts of Blair’s wealth vary. In 2014, Mr Blair though insisted that his net worth was less than £20 million and that he was not interested in making money.
In 2015, an investigation by the Telegraph newspaper maintained that Mr Blair’s personal fortune amounted to £60m.
Estimation site Celebrity Net Worth places this figure slightly lower at around £45.4 million ($60 million).
More recently, a large proportion of the former PM’s wealth is said to have come through the acquisition and growth of a property empire. The wider Blair family, including his wife Cherie Blair and son Euan Blair, has previously been reported to own some two dozen flats in Manchester valued at £27 million, as well as an £8 million house in London.
After leaving office, Mr Blair also went on to establish Tony Blair Associates and write memoirs including Tony Blair: A Journey, released in 2010. Mr Blair uses a lot of his fortune to fund his various charities and institutions, most notably the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
What has Tony Blair done after leaving Downing Street?
Hours after Blair tendered his resignation to the Queen in 2007, he was appointed by the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations) as special envoy to the Middle East. He stepped down from this position in 2015.
Blair currently serves as the executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He describes the organisation as a ‘new policy platform to refill the wide open space in the middle of politics’, aimed at combating a ‘frightening authoritarian populism’.
Blair was a prominent critic of the decision to withdraw from the European Union, and critical of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour party. He still makes media appearances from time to time commenting on British politics.
In June 2022, Tony Blair was knighted and appointed by the Queen to the Order of the Garter, Britain’s most prestigious royal order of chivalry.
Tony Blair net worth – How does it compare to other former PMs?
The approach of Tony Blair contrasts with that of his successor, Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown, who left No 10 in 2010, has said that he “never” kept any of his additional money after leaving office.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme in 2021, Brown said: “I gave all the money to charity and I’ve always done that, I’ve never taken any money for myself. All I’ve got to live on is the pension, that is a good pension that I’ve got from being an MP”.
Instead, Mr Blair’s approach to ‘post prime minister earnings’ can instead be better compared to a more recent incumbent in the form of Boris Johnson. In March 2023, Mr Johnson’s disclosures in the Register of MPs interests showed that his income in the first 6 months after leaving No 10 to have totalled almost £5m.
Since leaving office, Theresa May is also said to have earned well from a number of such lucrative engagements including £115,000 for her speech to the Ivy League University, Brown, in the United States.
Her predecessor, David Cameron has also earned well since leaving office, having picked up a number of roles advising international businesses — concentrating on innovative technology-driven sectors, including Fin-Tech, Medi-Tech and Artificial Intelligence.
