It was all smiles when new prime minister Tony Blair posed alongside the 101 ‘Blair Babes’ elected to parliament back in 1997.
But Harriet Harman, who set up the photoshoot, today criticises him for gate-crashing the event and undermining the bid to celebrate women’s progress.
Harman, 74, who stood down as a Labour MP this year, said the sight of Tony Blair surrounded by the women reminded her of the musical The King and I, in which a chauvinist King of Siam played by Yul Brynner, is shown towering over his many wives and children.
She told today’s edition of Radio 4’s The Reunion: ‘I organised a photograph of the hundred women and obviously notified Number 10 that we were going to do that, and we were horrified that Tony decided he was going to join us.
‘We wanted it to be one hundred and one strong women there representing women in the country and in Parliament. We didn’t want a man, any man, in the situation.’
The famous photograph was to mark the election of a record-breaking number of female Labour MPs. But the PM’s presence was a gift to headline writers, who inevitably dubbed them ‘Blair’s Babes’.
The King and I told the story of the love between a free-thinking English governess and the conceited King, played by Brynner in the 1951 original stage production and the 1956 film.
In today’s interview, Harman referenced a line from the song, Shall I Tell You What I Think of You in which Anna, the governess, likens the King to a ram surrounded by adoring sheep.
Harman said: ‘To be fair, Tony was the prime minister, he’d got a stonking majority, he’d supported all-women shortlists. So, the women were very supportive of him. But I think what was not understood is that we needed to show we were there on our own terms. Or otherwise, it looked like – it was like – the Yul Brynner thing in the King and I, a flock of sheep and he the only ram. We all looked like a supporting act.’
Anji Hunter, who served as Downing Street director of government relations in the first Blair government admitted she had arranged for Blair to be in the photograph.
But she was unapologetic: ‘I am not sorry about it. I am sorry Harriet feels like that. I think it gave huge publicity to the cause for women coming into Parliament which has been nothing but a good thing.’
Today’s edition of The Reunion looks at Tony Blair’s first 100 days in power.
Harman, appointed Secretary of State for Social Security and the first ever Minister for Women, said she was slow to appreciate how the election victory had changed the friendships at the heart of the New Labour project.
She said: ‘I remember Jack Straw when we were first meeting as a cabinet referring to Tony as prime minister and I thought ‘Oh God. That’s so obsequious and why is he doing that’.
‘But he got it. It was no longer Tony, that actually he was the prime minister and that was his main responsibility, and our kind of friendship group was not the point anymore.
‘It was office and it took me quite a while to recognise that.’
The Reunion is on BBC Radio 4 today at 10am and is also available via BBC Sounds.