With His Teen’s Drinking Binge Public, Blair Becomes Mr. Everyparent

LONDON —  Illegal and unseemly as it was, his underage son’s bout of falling-down drunkenness in central London drew more sympathy than retribution Friday for Prime Minister Tony Blair--and just when he needed it most.

Government squabbling and a controversial policy proposal have rankled many Britons in recent weeks and eroded Blair’s popularity. But these faded into the background after the prime minister appeared on national television near tears to defend his 16-year-old son, Euan, as “basically a good kid.”

A dead-of-night call of the sort that Blair received from police early Thursday is every parent’s nightmare. The news that his son had been discovered drunk and covered in his own vomit on the ground in Leicester Square turned the often-sanctimonious Blair into Mr. Everyparent.

“We are a strong family and we will see him right and we will get to the other side,” a contrite Blair said on BBC television late Thursday night.

The prime minister said he did not seek special preference for his son.

“If anyone breaks the law, they should suffer the penalty of the law, whether they’re my son or anyone else’s son,” he said.

The young Blair and his parents appeared at Kensington police station Friday afternoon for 30 minutes, a spokesman for the prime minister told Reuters news service. As a first-time offender, Euan received a reprimand.

The incident came on the heels of Blair’s public drubbing by the opposition Conservative Party over his widely criticized proposal to give police the authority to impose on-the-spot fines on drunken hooligans. While Blair has backed off the plan to march drunks to automatic teller machines, he stood by the principle.

“I think it is important that we take action against violent or aggressive or disorderly conduct, and I’m afraid that applies to my family and my son as much as it applies to anyone else’s,” Blair said.

Euan Blair was not violent or aggressive, but he did lie to police about his name and age. That apparent attempt to spare his father embarrassment seemed to fuel public sympathy for the family.

“His lies were, perhaps, worse than his drunkenness, but what would you do at that stage, in that situation, when your father is prime minister?” asked the Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper.

The Blairs have gone out of their way to keep their four children out of the media, and many Britons felt for them as the spotlight trained on their hung-over son.

“If you’re going to criticize Tony Blair, you’ll use this incident. But it’s not his fault,” said real estate agent Karen Williamson, a 40-year-old mother of two preteens. “I’ve got all the sympathy in the world for him. He wants to keep his private life private. . . . I would want the same thing.”

Blair is often criticized for being excessively moralistic and lecturing parents about their responsibilities. But cringing at memories of their own youthful hangovers, or at the misdeeds of their own teenagers, the members of the British media were remarkably gentle with the Blairs.

“You have to feel sorry for Euan Blair. He only did what thousands of other young people do when their exams end--yet he’s become a huge news story,” the Mirror tabloid wrote in an editorial.

The prime minister’s “brush with reality” will do wonders for Blair, who “has always seemed a little too good to be true,” the Independent said in its editorial. “But now the man who has tried so hard to be one of the people has truly joined the ranks of every parent in the land who has had trouble with their children.”

The Mirror was one of the only papers to take note of one of the most amazing facts of the case for an American: The son of the prime minister was out on the town without any bodyguards, a freedom the children of a U.S. president are not afforded.

Blair is hardly the first British politician to suffer embarrassment over the antics of an offspring. Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, was fined $50 for public drunkenness in Los Angeles in 1958. Former Prime Minister John Major’s son James had an all-too-public affair with a married colleague while working at a Marks & Spencer department store. And in 1997, the 17-year-old son of Home Secretary Jack Straw was caught peddling marijuana in a pub.

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Times staff writer Kirsten Studlien in London contributed to this report.