Papers side with Euan

Tony Blair has done his best to shield his children from the media spotlight. But with four kids - three of them adolescents - there was always the dreaded possibility that a junior Blair could end up on the front pages.

The family can take some comfort that when the time came and 16-year-old Euan's drunken night celebrating the end of his GSCEs was splashed across every paper, the tone of the writing was largely sympathetic.

Perhaps that is not so surprising - after all, what self-respecting hack has not found themselves in the same situation as the eldest Blair boy?

Don't be too hard on Euan. Didn't YOU ever get mullahed when you were a kid?

Daily Star

"Learning to drink sensibly is as much of an adult skill as learning to drive," writes Mary Ann Sieghart in The Times.

"Getting blind drunk on the way is an adolescent rite of passage as familiar as failing the driving test. But the rest of us are left to do it in peace."

The Daily Telegraph also concludes that getting hammered, throwing up and collapsing semi-conscious in the street - in Euan's case, Leicester Square - is a normal part of teenage life.

In headlines

Downing'em Street - The Mirror

Blair o' the dog - Daily Star

Just wait till your mother gets home! - Daily Mail

"Why do we do it? Probably because we're not supposed to and it makes us feel grown up," speculates Bryony Gordon.

Meanwhile, under the headline "Blair o' the dog", the Daily Star urges: "Don't be too hard on Euan. Didn't YOU ever get mullahed when you were a kid?" and suggests readers send in their own experiences of drunken teenage nights out.

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian suggests Euan may be rebelling and asks: "Is there a teenager anywhere who doesn't view with horror what adolescence must be like inside Number 10?"

Blair put on the spot

But while there is solidarity with Euan - who presumably spent most of Thursday nursing the mother of all hangovers - his dad doesn't get off quite so easily.

For his parental role, there is little but sympathy, with many papers noting that Mr Blair is not the first father to have been rung up by the local nick where their "drunk and incapable" offspring is cooling his (or her) heels.

Cheer up Euan, we've all been there... now get to the cashpoint and pay your £100 there's a good lad

The Mirror

"I'm sure most parents of teenagers will have had similar experiences," writes Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail.

However, few journalists can resist highlighting the irony that the prime minister had spent Wednesday afternoon in the Commons being ridiculed for suggesting police officers impose an on-the-spot cash fine on drunken louts - hauling them off to an ATM machine to pay up.

"Cheer up Euan, we've all been there... now get to the cashpoint and pay your £100 there's a good lad," The Mirror jeers on its front page.

"Battered Tony Blair must have felt like a stiff drink after his teenage son's booze shame," says The Sun, reckoning that the PM was enduring "the worst days of his life since he took office".

Poetry emotion

And in its leader column, the Telegraph accuses Mr Blair of making "a sort of capital out of his personal circumstances" and notes that he won a standing ovation at a conference on Thursday, for a speech peppered with references to his family.

But even the right wing newspapers acknowledge that the prime minister was close to tears at several times during public appearances on Thursday and almost every paper mentions that Mr Blair found comfort in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The words "For thine own purpose thou hast sent, The strife and the discouragement," must, they say, have provided him with a glimmer of light in the small hours of Thursday morning.