TONY! The Blair Musical the Pleasance Theatre, Islington, for a limited run in late September 2007. The production returned to the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2008, alongside its sequel "Tony of Arabia". Previews were performed at the Oxford North Wall and the Theatre Royal, Wakefield, in July 2008. The production begins with a news reporter announcing the fall of Tony Blair, before the erstwhile prime minister is carried onstage, funeral-style, by four pallbearers, to melancholic chants of "Tony!". He is then thrown to the ground to the crash of a drum fill, where he begins to sing the opening number, "Tony's Entrance," in which
Premiership of Tony Blair States foreign policy, notably by participating in the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. On 7 September 2006, Blair publicly stated he would step down as party leader by the time of the TUC conference in September 2007. On 10 May 2007, he announced his intention to resign as UK Prime Minister on 27 June 2007. Immediately after taking office, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown gave the Bank of England the power to set the UK base rate of interest autonomously, as agreed in 1992 in the Maastricht Treaty. This decision was popular with the British