Tony Blair, political showman, enjoyed company of celebrities

LONDON — From vacations at Cliff Richard’s Caribbean villa to a stay in Bee Gee Robin Gibb’s Miami home, Tony Blair has enjoyed the company of celebrities throughout his political career.

But in the wake of the Iraq war, many showbiz figures turned on the British leader, and his holidays at the homes of the famous became cause for embarrassment over whether he had paid for his stay.

Blair was elected on a surge of popular enthusiasm in 1997 — a political star for the era of Britpop and ‘‘Cool Britannia.’’

He hosted Downing Street receptions for the stars of fashion, music and the arts, and was photographed chatting cheerfully with Noel Gallagher, hell-raising songwriter for the band Oasis.

Blair was Britain’s first baby boom prime minister, and the first raised on rock ’n’ roll. As a young man he dreamed of becoming a rock star, putting on concerts in London and singing in a university band called Ugly Rumours.

During his first term, guests at Chequers, the prime minister’s weekend country home, included Sting, Elton John, David Bowie and Joan Collins. Blair’s showbiz friends include actor Kevin Spacey and veteran pop star Cliff Richard, whose Barbados villa has several times provided a holiday home for Blair and his family.

A politician acutely aware of the power of image, Blair tried to harness the force of celebrity for policy ends, most famously by joining with Band Aid founder Bob Geldof and U2 frontman Bono to press for aid and debt relief for Africa.

But some celebrities came to feel that they had been used by Blair’s image machine. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke was invited to Downing Street last year to discuss the environment, but said he turned it down because Blair had ‘‘no environmental credentials’’ and dealing with the Labour Party spin doctors made him feel ill.

Even Gallagher — who once said voting for Labour was ‘‘morally right’’ — came to regret his chumminess with Blair.

‘‘We all got carried away in ’97,’’ he said last year.

‘‘I think the Labour Party’s crowning achievement is the death of politics,’’ Gallagher told The Guardian newspaper. ‘‘There’s nothing left to vote for.’’

Blair’s association with the famous sometimes caused problems.

In 2005, he was criticized for taking a free vacation at Richard’s Barbados home. He and his family stayed there again the next year, but officials stressed that Blair paid his own holiday costs.

Blair said he paid again this year, when a winter vacation was spent at the Miami home of Gibb, one of the Bee Gees.

It was the Iraq war that drove the biggest wedge between Blair and many of his celebrity supporters. Musicians from Blur’s Damon Albarn to Radiohead’s Yorke excoriated Blair over the war.

Even Mick Jagger, who acknowledged being ‘‘ambivalent’’ about the conflict at the time, said in 2005 that it ‘‘shocked me to know that Blair already knew that the weapons of mass destruction were simply an excuse and that there was nothing planned for the day after (the invasion).’’

Blair’s successor is almost certainly Treasury chief Gordon Brown, a man more likely to spend the evening with a stack of papers than a raft of celebrities.