In the summer of 1996, the satirist Rory Bremner had a curious encounter with Tony Blair that showed the youthful premier-in-waiting was already lining up a circle of celebrity courtiers to cast a reflected glow of glory onto his government.

Bremner, holidaying in the south of France, had learnt that the Blairs were staying in the next village. To his astonishment he received a telephone call from Cherie Blair. “She asked me whether I wanted to play tennis,” he recalls. “To this day I don’t know how that came about.”

After a pleasant game with Blair and making a few jokes at the expense of John Major, then prime minister, Bremner raised a serious point. “I said, ‘We’re laughing at John Major now, but if you get into power the boot will be on the other foot and you’ll be on the receiving end.’

“Blair laughed rather nervously and said, ‘Uh, um, how does Lord Bremner sound to you?’ ” It was a joke, Bremner emphasises, “but he was aware of patronage and bringing people within the circle”.

Bremner believes the joke became more ironic over the years as he went from “believer to agnostic”. Indeed, his television series with John Bird and John Fortune looked like a more trenchant opposition to Blair than the Conservatives when they were preoccupied with internecine strife. His loss of faith parallels the collapse of Blair’s network of patronage.

The extent to which the prime minister strove to fill his “big tent” with the great, the good and the vacuous was revealed last week in a list of dinner guests at Chequers, his official country residence. Between 1997 and 2001, the Blairs hosted grand affairs for an eclectic mix of media folk, celebrities and pop stars, lawyers and novelists.

The 300-strong list, reading like a roll call of the new Labour establishment, included journalists Andrew Marr, James Naughtie, Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton and entertainers Elton John, David Bowie, Mick Hucknall, Sting and Bono. From the film world came Lords Attenborough and Puttnam, while actors Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson, Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons were keen to oblige.

These gatherings of up to 20 guests marked new Labour’s golden age, when Blair seldom put a foot wrong. Robert Harris, the novelist, who attended one of the Blairs’ first Chequers dinners in 1997, recalls: “Few prime ministers have come to power with such a great wave of enthusiasm.” Blair was at his most charming, not belabouring his guests with politics but keen to discuss sport or a movie. The only odd note was struck when Derry Irvine, the lord chancellor and Blair’s former legal mentor, bellowed: “Where’s young Blair? It’s time for young Blair to bring us some whisky!” The significance of these private dinners was in part Blair’s choice of guests, but something more subtle was also at work, believes Michael Cockerell, whose television documentaries have chronicled new Labour.

“From 1994, Blair was keen to identify the new Labour brand with the coming millennium — which was his way of lasering out the negatives from old Labour. He wanted to bring in role models who were young, trendy, black, gay, modern or beautiful — and sometimes all of the above.”

The flattery of an invitation to Chequers was a powerful piece of persuasion. Peter Kellner, the pollster and commentator, remembers his evening at Chequers six years ago with pleasure.

“Physically, it’s a very striking place,” he says. “Security is very tight and you’re met by armed guards at the entrance. Cherie was dressed in a black evening gown and Tony was in smart denims, which I deduced was to make everybody feel at ease.

“After dinner we went on a little tour of the house. In the main bedroom there were some paintings by old masters, one of which Churchill had painted a little mouse on during the war. You end up in the library for coffee, around an octagonal table on which sits a battered leather bag that was Napoleon’s briefcase.”

A pall seems to have been cast over such evenings in Blair’s second term. A guest list for 2001-3 suggests he was trawling the B-list of celebrities. The names of Des O’Connor, Geri Halliwell, Esther Rantzen and Michael Ball stirred sharp comment when they were released by the Cabinet Office last year. “Why should we pay for Des O’Connor’s dinner?” a newspaper headline demanded.