Professor Ivor Norman Richard DaviesFBA, FRHistS (born 8 June 1939) is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

Davies was born to Richard and Elizabeth Davies in Bolton, Lancashire. He studied in Grenoble, France from 1957 to 1958 and then under A. J. P. Taylor at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a B.A. in History in 1962. He was awarded an M.A. at the University of Sussex in 1966 and also studied in Perugia, Italy. He intended to study for a Ph.D. in the Soviet Union but was denied an entry visa, so instead he went to Kraków, Poland, to study at the Jagiellonian University and do research on the Polish–Soviet War. As this war was denied in the official communist Polish historiography of that time, he was obliged to change the title of his dissertation to The British Foreign Policy towards Poland, 1919–20. After he obtained his Ph.D. in Kraków in 1968, the English text appeared under the title White Eagle, Red Star. The Polish-Soviet War 1919–20 in 1972.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.

Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.