How Tony Blair fell in love with the Capital

&149 Amanda Mackenzie Stuart with the Queen Mother in 1970

Believe it or not, these are just a few of the phrases to appear in former Prime Minister Tony Blair's account of his time in Edinburgh.

His memoirs include a vivid passage recalling his first love, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, a fellow pupil at Fettes.

He reveals it was at her parents' home in the New Town that he and Gordon Brown held some of their most crucial discussions about the party leadership following John Smith's death.

He writes: "I loved the romance of meeting at Amanda's. You know the first person you ever fall in love with; you know that incredible outpouring of desire, the overwhelming sense of something unique, inexpressible, inexplicable and even at points incomprehensible, but so thrilling, uplifting, your heart pumping and soaring?

"I was 18, in my last year at Fettes. She was the only girl at the school - the first, the experiment, and so chosen because she was the daughter of the chairman of the governors.

"They were an amazing family. He was Britain's judge at the European Court of Justice, her mother was a charming and delightful diplomat. They had four daughters, of whom Amanda was the oldest. I was utterly love-struck."

Mr Blair's first girlfriend is now Amanda Hay, a married mother-of-two and film producer living in Oxford. After going out with the future Prime Minister she switched her attentions to one Charlie Falconer, later to be Lord Chancellor in Mr Blair's Cabinet.

She is said still to be on good terms with both men.

In his book, Mr Blair describes his ex-girlfriend's "beautiful 18th century stone house" in the New Town "whose terraces and crescents are architectural masterpieces".

Tony Blair at Fettes in 1968

He goes on: "Edinburgh is perhaps as beautiful as any city in the world. I knew and adored every street around New Town. I walked it all, then and for years afterwards, finding security, comfort and repose in the familiarity of it, the sense of certainty and self-sufficiency of its design that seemed also to imbue the middle and upper-class folk of Edinburgh."

When he first visited the Mackenzie Stuarts as a teenager, politics played little part in his life. He was more interested in Led Zeppelin and Cream.

He remained firm friends with the family because he returned to their home following John Smith's death in 1994. It was there he conducted tricky discussions with Gordon Brown about who should succeed him, and the house proved familiar and reassuring.

"Somehow, in some slightly odd way, in Amanda's home, surrounded by evidence of her presence, I felt a confidence about the task in hand."

Mr Blair says there was never a deal that Mr Brown would back him for the leadership in return for help to succeed him, but there was "an understanding of mutual interest".

He says: "The first occasion he actually broached acceptance that he would stand aside and support me was at Amanda's. Up to then he maintained the fiction that he would fight me for it. I knew he wouldn't.

"After the conversation at Amanda's parents' home, we sat in the kitchen looking out over the gardens and scrubland in the small indentation under Dean Bridge, near to where I had done a spell on a voluntary project for the down-and-out in lieu of school corps. We were then simply managing how he could withdraw gracefully."

Tony and Cherie Blair

Mr Blair also describes in the book how views of Edinburgh from the Caledonian Hotel helped him prepare for a difficult speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow on the same day as mass demonstrations against the Iraq war.

"From the suite I could see Arthur's Seat rising up behind Edinburgh Castle. Somehow looking out of the hotel window at the rock and the castle and all the familiar sights of Edinburgh, my mind settled as it needed to in order that I write this speech."

But Mr Blair admits to being less comfortable with the devolution agenda, despite his government's rapid action to create the Scottish Parliament. He confesses: "I was never a passionate devolutionist. It is a dangerous game to play. You can never be sure where nationalist sentiment ends and separatist sentiment begins. However, though not passionate about it, I thought it inevitable.

"We didn't want Scotland to feel the choice was status quo or separation."

He says devolution was a central part of Labour's election programme.

But he adds: "The Scots were notoriously prickly about the whole business.

"I always thought it extraordinary: I was born in Scotland, my parents were raised there, we had lived there, I had been to school there, yet somehow they contrived to make me feel alien."

Ronnie Guild, who was Tony Blair's housemaster at Fettes, said he was looking forward to reading the memoirs but did not recall the romance between the future Prime Minister and his first girlfriend. "In a place like Fettes, everyone is busy on their own thing."

He added: "You could say I gave him his first promotion. I made him head of the dormitory. I think there were eight people in a dormitory and someone had to be head. Obviously, that put him halfway to Downing Street."

How Tony Blair fell in love with the Capital - and a local girl