Tony New Addresses : 'President' Blair's expanding real-estate empire.(Tony Blair)(Brief Article)

The story was a one-day wonder. On June 30 the London Sunday Times claimed to have got its hands on a confidential [Pound sterling]850,000 plan for a "lavish refurbishment" of Prime Minister Tony Blair's office-cum-residence at 10 Downing Street. The disclosure, the paper said, was "bound to re- open the row over the Blairs' presidential manner." Blair's press team quickly knocked down the story as a "gross exaggeration." But the "President Blair" issue has become a very real one for Britain's political establishment. And, as the Labour government sails through its sixth year in power, the literal brick-and-mortar expansion of the Blair government does in fact say a lot about the new architecture of power under Britain's young prime minister.

The quaint, flat-above-the-shop mystique of "Number 10" had been fading for decades. Under Blair, it's disappeared. The growth of the prime minister's staff and, to a lesser extent, the needs of the Blairs as a family have outgrown the famously unimposing Georgian building on Downing Street. "Number 10" is no longer just Number 10. It now includes Number 11, where Tony and Cherie and their four children live above the traditional office of the chancellor of the Exchequer; and Number 12, home now to the burgeoning Blair press-office operation. To some, all this smacks of Washington--where 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the center of a massive executive operation--not London. "This has more than a whiff of the White House about it," says historian Peter Hennessy.

The charge does not seem to faze Blair. Impatient with the civil-service bureaucracy, less than obeisant to backbench Labour M.P.s who are not among his ministers and damned if he will be roadblocked by a cantankerous British press, the prime minister has rechanneled power in Downing Street and along Whitehall, heartland of the vaunted British civil service. Blair has shortened meetings of his cabinet to 20 or 30 minutes. He spends less time in Parliament than any prime minister of the last century, according to Richard Rose of the University of Strathclyde. He has more than trebled the number of politically appointed "special advisers" on his staff. By planting similar loyalists ...