The Design Council’s offices - recently described by Design Week as the design industry’s "business venue" - played host to Prime Minister Tony Blair today.

Mr Blair was delivering a keynote speech on ‘Politics and the economy: the new dividing lines’ at an event organised with the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Mr Blair stressed in his speech that the future would be driven by ‘the knowledge economy, e-commerce, new technology’ - all of which were key themes in the Design Council’s Design in Business Week ’99.

Another of the key speakers, political commentator Peter Kellner, referred to the Design Council’s premises in his address about ‘the new politics,’ saying: ‘The switch of this building from being a telephone exchange to the Design Council is itself a very good illustration of the change we are going through.

‘We are moving from "telephone exchange" politics - about wiring, about engineering, about machines - to Design Council politics, which is much more about humanising our environment, about values, about judgement, about relationships.’

Mr Blair will be the first of three senior politicians to visit the Design Council in two weeks. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook will be addressing a seminar at Bow Street on Wednesday 24 November and Chancellor Gordon Brown will be speaking at an event the following day, Thursday 25 November.