‘Welcome to being a woman on TV’: Tony Blair Institute had more comments about his lockdown hair than anything else in past year

Tony Blair on GMB

(GMB)

Tony Blair told today how his institute, which has led the way on fighting Covid-19, has received more messages on his long, lockdown hair than on vaccines or any other coronavirus subjects.

Appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he was quizzed by presenters Alastair Campbell and Susanna Reid about why he had let his hair grow so long which sparked a flurry of comments when he did an interview for the Evening Standard’s London Rising series with this new appearance.

Mr Campbell and Ms Reid suggested he looked like “Gandalf”, “Alvin Stardust” or “Gerry Francis”.

The ex-PM responded: “Well Gandalf is better than some of the things that I’ve been called.

“It’s lockdown, any way it’s done, it’s over,” he added, now with far shorter hair.

Mr Blair continued: “The thing that is interesting and depressing about politics is that my institute (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change) over the last 12 months has done all this stuff around vaccines...literally when I said to my people ‘so what have we received most traffic about in this last year...which one of these topics?’, they said ...’no, actually your hair’.”

Ms Reid responded: “Welcome to being a woman on television...because frankly what you look like, what you wear and what your hair looks like is probably the main thing that you get traffic about.”

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