As Tony Blair celebrates 20 years as MP for Sedgefield, he talks exclusively to Political Editor Chris Lloyd on the flight north about Fishburn Cokeworks, Labour's traditional values and the worst plane journey of his life.

THE Blairs are used to planes. Tony carries three-year-old Leo aboard and there is not a peep out of the little fellow as he sleeps from Heathrow to Newcastle.

His father, meanwhile, recalls his worst flight a few years ago from Washington to San Francisco. Washington was surrounded by ferocious electrical storms and the plane was stranded on the runway, unable to take off.

Eventually the pilot came on the intercom. "We've been sat here for two hours and I'm getting chewed off and I expect you are too," says the Prime Minister in mock American drawl, "so we're going to give it a go, we're gonna take it on."

They took off and took it on, and were bounced about as if on a helter skelter. The passengers were belted into their seats and the air hostesses were chained to the walls. After an hour or so, Mr Blair could take no more. He undid his belt, walked down the aisle with the hostesses shouting "sit down, sit down", liberated the drinks trolley and started serving to the passengers...

But the interview isn't to swop in-flight experiences; it is to commemorate his 20th anniversary as MP for Sedgefield.

In May 1983, the newly-formed constituency of Sedgefield was the last in the country to select a candidate. The Trimdon branch of the constituency party was the last to nominate a candidate. So Mr Blair, a 30-year-old barrister living in London who had grown up in Durham, had to make himself known to the branch chairman, John Burton. On the night in question, Mr Burton was more interested in watching the European Cup final on the telly.

'I was in despair because I thought I had blown my chances completely," recalls Mr Blair. "I was desperate to get into Parliament to help change the Labour Party so it could offer an alternative to the Conservatives, but it was proving very difficult because Labour was very left wing."

After the football went to extra time and penalties, Burton and the other members of the branch turned their minds to politics and agreed to give Blair a chance. With Burton guiding him - with sleight of hand on at least one occasion - through the tortuous process, Blair was selected.

Even if he hadn't won Sedgefield, he says he would have moved north anyway in search of a safe seat.

The election was on June 9, and Mr Blair was returned with a majority of 8,281 on a platform of immediate withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament and renationalisation. A photo in the Echo's archives shows him in a very bad checked shirt busting with pride as the result is announced.

But the party's stance, he insists, wasn't his own. "I voted in favour of going into Europe in 1975 and I specifically said at my selection in 1983 in private - I couldn't say this publicly - that I would want to change the policy of Europe, and I was instrumental in getting us to change our position on nuclear weapons, too. The party had a set of positions and I was marked down as a "new Labour" person and it caused me a lot of grief in my early days."

So if he disagreed so fundamentally with what the Labour Party stood for, why was he so desperate to represent it?

"At its best, the Labour Party stands up for the average person. It wants them to get a fair crack of the whip. That's what I believe in and that's why I was always going to be in the Labour Party and not the Tory party." (His father Leo was prevented by ill-health from standing as a Tory candidate in Durham.)

"The problem was that the Labour Party had been captured by various pressure groups which had driven it to a far left set of positions that were totally hopeless in terms of their connection with the public or their ability to understand the modern world.

"But I had very strong attachment to the party's values, and I have always believed that what we have done as a Government is return the party to its values. That is disputed by people on the left, but if you look at the new deal, the minimum wage, the massive increase in health and education spending, these are very traditional Labour policies but they are being pursued in a different way in today's world.

'In Keir Hardie's time nationalising everything was the way. If it wasn't for nationalisation of the coal mines in the 1940s, the miners would never have had decent health and safety protection or improvements in terms and conditions of employment.

"But nationalisation isn't the way in today's post-mass production world.

"It is the application of values that have changed, not the values themselves. The values are for all time, the polices are for one time, and the policies should change from generation to generation."

Indeed, 20 years ago - practically a generation ago - Mr Blair's first involvement with The Northern Echo was to campaign against the closure of Fishburn cokeworks. He lost. The works closed in 1986 with the loss of 273 jobs.

In 1991, Fishburn parish council wrote to the paper saying, in retrospect, that the works' closure was the best thing that ever happened to the village. "Instead of a smoke-belching factory, we now have a farm and woodlands, a golf course, wetlands and a walkway to a wildlife lake," said the letter.

Looking at a photo of himself outside the doomed cokeworks, with what can only be described as a 1980s' mullet sprouting from behind his ears, Mr Blair chuckles and says: "I remember in 1986 a local councillor coming to me and saying 'it's very good of you to do all this but the people are fed up with factory'."

He continues: "Would we fight a similar campaign today? Probably not, but it was a different situation then because unemployment was 20 per cent in the constituency and it is only seven per cent today."

But, 20 years later, aren't similar campaigns still being fought on Teesside to save Corus and in south Durham to save everyone from Black & Decker to Blue Circle via Electrolux and LG Philips.

"A firm like Black & Decker has very skilled jobs, and it would be a real shame if they were to go," he says, "but there is a greater recognition nowadays that there is a churning in the world economy."

"The honest truth", he says, is that people have to accept that churn. They have to go with the flow as one wave of industries washes over the region and then ebbs away to be replaced by a new, modern wave.

"What government does now is less in relation to a particular company or industry which is a very 1960s or 1970s notion and is what the old left has traditionally focussed upon," he says.

"Then the Thatcherites came along and said we should forget about jobs and let the market rule. We have a more sophisticated and sensible view today. There is a role for government but it is an enabling role. It is providing the infrastructure and the help for people to equip themselves for what is a rapidly changing market with constant updates in technology.

"And we have to provide economic stability, which we have with low inflation and low interest rates. That, in the end, is of more benefit than saving a particular job in a particular company if the company has ceased to be profitable."

This is the new Labour approach of 2003 which he accepts is very different to the old Labour of 1983.

"Shortly after the 1983 election, I addressed a meeting at Spennymoor Town Hall," he says, and he's laughing at a fond memory but blushing because it was so very embarrassing. "It was a very early lesson in politics because I said exactly what I thought. I said we were living in a new age but were talking like everyone had just got black and white TVs."

His laughter almost prevents him from telling the story. Dennis Skinner, " the Beast of Bolsover" - "I laugh with him about it now, he's a good friend and good supporter" - followed him onto the platform and ripped into him condemning him as "a traitor to socialism". The people of Spennymoor raucously applauded Mr Skinner and their new MP slunk humiliated out of the building.

'I always remember coming out and saying to John Burton 'I'm very sorry', but he said 'you shouldn't be sorry at all, but you've got to learn to say it differently - you were the only person making sense in the whole room'.

"I had to show people how it was not in defiance of their values but simply a modern expression of them."

The plane banks over Newcastle. The coast bathed in sunshine rears into view in the window over the Prime Minister's shoulder.

"I do like the sun," he says, his eyes following the golden sand of the coastal path as it picks its way along the top of the green cliffs. "Twenty years," he says wistfully, "I've been an MP for 20 years...

"I've been incredibly lucky..."

It is a soft landing.