TONY BLAIR: BRITAIN'S MAN OF THE HOUR : NEW PRIME MINISTER CAPTIVATES A NATION.

Byline: Warren Hoge The New York Times

When Tony Blair was 11, his father, a lawyer and university lecturer in the northern English city of Durham, suffered a disabling stroke, and the boy thought his world had ``fallen apart.'' By Blair's account, a man who had been ``very ambitious, successful, a go-getter,'' was stilled and speechless, and the son was uncomprehending.

Blair told this affecting story to a conference of his Labor Party in Blackpool in October in what was a strikingly confessional moment for a British politician and particularly for one as discreet and guarded as the new 43-year-old prime minister of Britain.

Some people, aware of the comparisons often made between the telegenic young British leader and President Clinton, dismissed the telling of the tale as ``American style,'' a pejorative in British political commentary.

But the audience was rapt, and they were Blair's objective. Younger and more middle-class than people who had sat in the delegate seats at any past Labor convention, they were there because of his remarkable makeover of their party. Yet he still worried they might attribute his success to style rather than soul, might think that things came too easily to Tony Blair, might wonder whether he understood that life could be a struggle.

He told of how the family finances suffered and how his mother took three years to teach his father to walk and talk again. And then he came to his point. ``I don't pretend to you that I had a deprived childhood,'' he said. ``I didn't, but I learned a sense of values in my childhood.''

As deft as he has been in turning the clattering old Labor Party, loser of four straight elections, into a clean-running engine of victory, he is eager for people to believe it runs not on some synthetic concocted in campaign laboratories but on conviction and values.

He is stepping into the leadership of the country after a safety-first campaign aimed at assuring the voters of Middle England that the party has been defanged. He has talked of his admiration of the purposefulness of the major player in British politics of his lifetime, Margaret Thatcher, and suggested that he was heir to her brand of movement politics. But while she prepared a real revolution in 1979, he has so far mixed a recipe for maintenance of the status quo.

All this has left him vulnerable to the judgment that he is packaged goods rather than the real thing. In the last weeks of the campaign the word ``passion'' got a lot of air time in the Blair campaign.

His early struggle with his father's illness aside, Blair's life story is not the fable of a born dragon slayer.

Born in Edinburgh on May 6, 1953, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was educated at Durham Choristers, Fettes College in Edinburgh, known as the Eton of Scotland, and Oxford University, where he studied law.

The discipline over himself and his party that he was to display in later years was evident even then. He confined his rebelliousness to growing his hair long, wearing 1970s fashions and singing in a rock band called Ugly Rumors.

His biographer, John Rentoul, says he was ``discreet about sex, abstemious about drugs and earnest about rock 'n' roll.'' A male acquaintance once said he was the kind of person who you'd suspect might press his jeans.

Before Oxford, he spent a year in London, where he drove a van, moved equipment for musical groups, worked in the basement of a department store and slept on the sofas of friends.

``It was one of the best things I ever did,'' he said in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine last weekend. ``It taught me about how other people lived, the real world, if you like,'' he said with the guilelessness that some find disarming and others cloying.

After college he became a lawyer in London, nursing a vague interest in public affairs and swapping sentiments about a classless society and reformist politics with friends but more concerned, because of the experience that had befallen his family and by his own admission, in guaranteeing his own personal security.

He joined the Labor Party with less passion for its causes of nationalization and trade union power than uneasiness with its narrow-band membership and core socialist focus. One of his first acts as a party member was to write a paper urging the party to try to understand the appeal of the liberal Social Democratic Party.

In 1980 he married a fellow lawyer, Cherie Booth, who has gone on to become one of London's best-known attorneys. The couple have three children: Ewan, 13, Nicholas, 11, and Kathryn, 9.

Blair's first attempt at running for office was an unsuccessful by-election in 1982 for a seat considered unwinnable for Labor in Beaconsfield, west of London. A year later, he went north to Sedgefield, near Durham, and gained the seat he still holds today.

His posts in Parliament put him in touch with constituencies he would one day try to make the broad base of what he calls the ``New Labor'' Party - trade union people whom he tried to ease into recognition of their diminished power, law enforcement officials who acquainted him with the appeal of law and order to crime-ridden neighborhoods, and businessmen and financiers in the City of London with whom his years as a lawyer made him comfortable.

He made his way on intelligence, energy, charm and discipline. Politics itself, the dealing and trading and smoky-room wrangling, held less appeal. To this day, he will often put the word ``tribal'' before the word ``politics,'' an indication of his feeling that it is more divisive than unifying.

Blair's progress toward becoming the ambitious and focused person who has taken over British public life was clearly gradual.

Geoff Gallop, an Oxford classmate from Australia, didn't spot it in college but remembers encountering a man who had taken on resolve when he saw his old friend in 1992. ``Power can fizzle out very quickly if it's not accompanied by a natural authority,'' he said, ``and it was flowing from him.''

When Labor lost its fourth straight national election that year, its leader, Neil Kinnock, resigned, replaced by his deputy, John Smith. When Smith died in 1994, the leading candidate to succeed him was his right-hand man, Gordon Brown, a Scottish economist with a brilliant mind but dour public image.

Blair let it be known that he thought he stood a better chance of uniting the party behind the mission of winning. In the old Labor Party, it would have been time for a blood-letting. In New Labor, the moment called for a civilized settlement, and it took place in a place typifying the dark-suited, mobile-phoned personality of the refashioned party - the minimalist Granita restaurant in Islington, the neighborhood that is to London what the Upper West Side is to New York.

Blair was chosen, and, with Brown as his right-hand man, set out to pick up the pace of reform that had been set in motion by his two predecessors. He wrote nationalization out of the party's constitution, reduced its dependency on trade union money and turned it into the champion of the guy trying to get ahead. His iron-hand rule enriched his reputation for strong leadership, while his ability to state party objectives in broad and nonthreatening ways earned him the nickname of ``Tony Blur'' from enemies but brought tens of thousands of new members into the party.

One of them is his father, Leo, the one-time chairman of the Durham Conservative Association. Last year, he left the Conservative Party, and Thursday he cast the first Labor vote of his life.

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Photo: Labor Party leader Tony Blair, 43, became prime minister after his party's landslide victory.

Associated Press