Tony Blair's confidant Lord Michael Levy opens doors for his people 

Photos: Mendel photography

IT was a big day for the Yesodey HaTorah girls’ school in London, and in best British tradition, it was pouring.

The chareidi school in the Stamford Hill neighborhood, founded in 1942, had just moved onto a new campus funded by Tony Blair’s government, and the star-studded line-up for the renaming ceremony  was evidence of the high-level contacts that had brought state funding to a private Jewish school.

But as the dignitaries gathered in the rain and wind, the ceremony got off to a bad start: The curtain over the dedication plaque refused to budge.

It was an awkward moment for the hosts — until Lord Michael Levy took things into his own hands.

The Stamford Hill born, Shomer Shabbos peer — who’d risen from humble origins to become an entrepreneur, Labour Party fundraiser, and Blair’s trusted adviser as well as tennis partner — had actually been honored with the unveiling. And true to his self-help philosophy, a stubborn dedication plaque wasn’t going to deter him.

So, in front of the assembled guests, the silver-haired, dapper lord — officially styled “Baron Levy” — got hold of a ladder, climbed to the top, freed the cord, and spared the organizers’ blushes.

The hands-on performance was vintage Michael Levy. His conversational references to “gelechter” and “frish meshiga” betray his Stamford Hill origins, and mark him out as a paragon of a very Anglo-Jewish type of success story, who rose to prominence without forgetting his modest roots.

Levy’s rise was thanks in large part to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who turned the entrepreneur with a warm Jewish heart into a Middle East peace envoy. In turn, Levy, a former successful record label owner, served as Blair’s door to the Jewish community.

“I always joke that Tony Blair has more yarmulkes than I have,” says Lord Levy “because each time I gave him one for an event, I never got it back.”

Twenty-five years after his former boss upended British politics by leading his New Labour Party to a landslide victory, Lord Levy, now 78, looks back at those glory years from the House of Lords, at the other end of the Palace of Westminster from where Tony Blair once dominated Parliament.