He entered the Parliament of the United Kingdom as a Tory in 1818 to protect the interests of the West Indian planter class.
[9]) For the 1,598 slaves he owned on the Blairmont plantation he had inherited in British Guyana, Blair was awarded £83,530 8 shillings and 11 pennies (equivalent to £9,590,000 in 2023).
[1][8] At the 1818 general election, Blair bought a seat in Parliament, in the rotten borough of Saltash in Devon.
[2] That seat was bought for one Parliament only from Michael George Prendergast, who had purchased a life interest from the borough's owner James Buller.
Blair had entered Parliament to defend the slave plantations, and while he voted on conventional Tory lines, he did not speak in the Commons until March 1824, in the debates which followed the Demerara rebellion of 1823.
[12] His only other contribution to Parliamentary debates was in 1825,[3] when he supported retaining the preferential tariff on sugar imported from the West Indies.
The bulk of his wealth, including the Penninghame estate, was bequeathed to his brother-in-law Colonel William Henry Stopford, an officer in the Royal Artillery.