According to some opinion polls, he is the most popular prime minister of all time. According to conventional wisdom, he will be re-elected in the coming general election, which will probably be held in June. Yet for someone in full command of his party and his job, Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, remains a surprisingly unknown figure. Although often compared to Clinton, he is very un-Clinton-like in his sense of privacy: He doesn't, in fact, want to share his emotions with us. He hates talking about himself, and in interviews he usually sticks to a particular form of "New Labor" policy rhetoric he has made his own. A recent article he wrote (or someone wrote for him) for the British magazine Prospect was classic: "The third way represents a historic realignment of economic and social policy, at a time when the old boundaries between economy, state and society are breaking down."  

All of which is why, when I interviewed Blair for a British newspaper a few weeks ago, I decided to ask him to talk a little bit more about his political beliefs. The full interview appeared in the Sunday Telegraph (click here to read it) but, to kick off the British campaign and to distract everyone from the gloomy tale of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the British countryside, I thought I would mull over a few of the highlights here, for the benefit of Slate's non-British, non-Blair-following readership.

For one, it is worth noting that meeting Tony Blair is nothing remotely like meeting an American president—or even like meeting Margaret Thatcher in her glory days. His entourage was surprisingly modest, largely female, and not at all intimidating: They really do call him Tony. I had flown to Scotland to see him—the interview took place on the airplane from Inverness to London—and was surprised to find that he travels with a few youngish aides, plus press spokesman, plus security; three cars in all. There was none of the barely suppressed hysteria that I have seen surrounding Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr., no one shouting into telephones, no plainclothes policemen elbowing people out of the way.

This, it seems to me, is deliberate. Indeed, in the early minutes of the interview, Blair alluded to his dogged determination to remain low-key. I had asked him how he felt about combining his work and his family life, which is, with four children and a high-powered working wife, unusual for a British prime minister. It is, he replied, "the biggest problem of the job, balancing family. Just sometimes, you'd love to be able to do things in a very normal way. … The other night I went out to a restaurant with my daughter because it was her birthday, and you've still got to go with all the entourage and everything. Sometimes it would be nice to be absolutely normal."

I asked if he missed being normal. "Yeah," he said emphatically—but he qualified it. "I am still very normal. I was saying to some children today in the school that I visited, that they are meeting someone who is very well known, but what they don't realize is that I was just like them, and I feel basically exactly the same as I always do. … And the fact is, we'll go in and go out, and when I stop being prime minister, people won't pay any attention to me again."

It is an odd sentiment, if you think about it: Most people, if they want to preserve their normality, wouldn't spend most of their lives trying to become prime minister, and what's more, trying to remain prime minister. But Blair has, which may be part of why British journalists spend so much energy trying to understand him: It seems almost impossible that someone who is so anxious to preserve his ordinariness could voluntarily choose to become prime minister. And many of the expected explanations don't seem to work. The fame, he told me, "is a mixed blessing," and "you don't do it for the money." The "trappings," as he put it, don't interest him either. "I'm not big on status," he said at one point, and I am inclined to believe him.

All of which means that you have to look elsewhere for his motivations, most of which do seem to lie in the Blair worldview, which has always seemed to me more authentically idealistic than most usually suspect. His language, the examples he uses, the off-hand things he says to fill the occasional silences in the conversation all testify to that deep belief in the possibility of human progress that so many people have mocked. After four years of power, I had expected some of this to wear off, or at least for Blair's language to have become more muted, his goals more sober. But when I raised it with him, he turned out to be, if anything, more worried by questions of morality in politics now than he ever was in the past: "There is a very interesting debate which I used to study at university—I was not interested in it then but I'm interested in it now—between the concept of natural law and utilitarianism. I've shifted far more toward the first, having been for a long time for the second."

Natural law, for those who don't remember the argument, is the belief that there is an intrinsic order to the universe and a hierarchy of values: It is perhaps best described as the opposite of moral relativism and is associated with both Catholicism and certain strains of contemporary conservative thought.

"I'm far more of a believer in … the power and the necessity to make judgments about the human condition, as opposed to simply saying, 'Well, look, what's good for the greatest number is fine.' … I'm a great respecter of science and the ability of science to inform our perceptions of the world. But I think there is a danger sometimes that we look at everything just in terms of what its utilitarian value is."

Unprompted, this conversation about natural law led him directly to the subject of Kosovo, which he said he "can argue was an act of self-interest, in the sense that I think had we not intervened in Kosovo, there would have been serious consequences for Europe as a whole. But if I'm frank about it, that's not really what motivated me. … To allow racial genocide to happen right on our doorstep and do nothing about it would have been criminal on our part."