Cherie Booth :)

From The Times May 10, 2008

Cherie Blair: motherhood, makeovers and making ends meet – my life in Downing Street
The journey from the rough side of Crosby to the smart side of London has left its mark

Interview by Janice Turner

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3905151.ece?token=null&offset=0


With typical gallumphing Cherie timing, we meet just as news breaks that the Blairs are buying Sir John Gielgud’s former country pile in Buckinghamshire for £4 million. So you’ve written a whole book telling everyone that you’re broke and now you own this mansion, I say. “But we were short of money at the time,” Cherie protests, “and now Tony has been lucky enough to get a job which means we can afford a country house.” Mr Blair has signed a reputed £2.5 million deal advising the American bank JPMorgan. This, plus an estimated advance on his memoirs of £4.6 million and hers of £1.5 million means that the perilous years of supporting what Cherie calls “a mortgage the size of Mount Snowdon” on their £3.5 million house in Connaught Square are clearly over.

“Yes, that was very scary,” says Cherie of this period. “Particularly since I was the person who had to support it. Because whatever else happened, we had to meet the monthly payment and it was down to me. Because no one else was going to meet it, were they?” The last sentence is said with a grim smile, since she partly did so with a series of lucrative speaking engagements in America that drew criticism that she was exploiting her status as the serving Prime Minister’s wife.

Anxiety about money is the unifying theme of Cherie Blair’s autobiography. It is why she barely saw her actor parents until she was 2 as they left her to be raised by her paternal grandmother while they struggled in touring rep. After Cherie’s flakey father Tony Booth abandoned them for good, her elegant, RADA-trained mother Gale was forced to toil in a chippie. Fiscal dread even accompanies young Cherie’s educational triumphs. How will they pay for the uniform to her smart grammar school? How can student Cherie, surviving on Dairylea triangles, afford to join the Inns of Court, her Bar exams, the compulsory dinners, even her wig and gown? The answer, always, was by winning a scholarship, by being the best.

Fast forward to Cherie and Tony, newly arrived in No 10, wondering what to do about their heavily mortgaged family home in Richmond Terrace, North London. Rent it out? Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s press secretary, reminds them of Norman Lamont’s tenant, Miss Whiplash. Lord Levy, a Blair adviser, says sell. So they step off the London property market just as it shoots into space. Consequently, as Mr Blair plans his departure, Cherie panics about her family being homeless. “Tony’s attitude to money,” she writes, “has always been: ‘I just want to do what’s right, and somehow or other we’ll sort it out’. ” Or rather, as the main breadwinner, Cherie would.

The book is in effect a rebuttal of allegations that have made Cherie among the most reviled women of our age: that she is a greedy, grabby freebie-lover with aspirations to grandness. Her case is logical and convincing, as you might expect from a top-flight QC. But funny too: she recounts struggling in an Italian jewellery shop to prevent a bandana-clad Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, from buying her an expensive necklace that would break government gift rules. And whether you believe it or not, hers is a case seldom put, certainly not by officials at No 10, who, far from defending her from criticism, routinely left her out to dry.

But now, I say, it looks as though having bought your No 10, you’re buying your Chequers. “I don’t know why they say our Connaught Square house is a mini No 10, because it isn’t really, except I don’t have my key to the front door.” Cherie means that she still doesn’t need to carry a key, since while at Downing Street staff let her in, now she is admitted by the armed policemen who guard her new home. Mr Blair will retain 24-hour police protection as long as he is considered a terrorist target, which, given his mission to the Middle East, will not end any time soon. But Cherie had looked forward to carrying her own key again: it seems to represent to her privacy, autonomy, normality.

“The house is not like Chequers except that it is a country house,” she continues. “And one thing Chequers taught us is we like getting out of London at weekends. And for the last year, it’s been a shame we haven’t had a place to escape to.” But this is a very grand house, I say, thinking of the Grade I listing, seven bedrooms, two paddocks, the 52ft drawing room. “It’s not as grand as the house next door, [Wooton House, a stately home] of which it’s the coach house, but it is a nice house. It is going to be a fantastic place to go with the children.”

I ask if when viewing this magnificent potential home she had marvelled at how far she had come from the rough side of Crosby, where she shared her grandmother’s bed, while her sister slept with her mum and Uncle Bob had a camp bed on the landing. “I think that this girl from 15 Ferndale Road has been to Balmoral, to see the Queen, to Buckingham Palace, met the Pope, had Stevie Wonder at the White House sing My Cherie Amour, how lucky is that?” It is quintessential Cherie Blair: self-mythologising and sentimental Scouser, but nonetheless a raw sense of being a working-class outsider, competing against a smooth and privileged elite, has never truly left her. “It is extraordinary that people think because I am a QC I must have lived the life that my children lead,” she says.

It has become almost a cliché to say that Cherie looks better in the flesh. Indeed, that this was said by almost everyone she met as prime minister’s wife, helped to buffer her self-esteem against the ghastly, gurning shots chosen by newspapers. Today at Matrix chambers, she looks handsome in a white print shirt-dress bought in Selfridges (which her daughter Kathryn is delighted to discover is walking distance from Connaught Square). Her often cussed hair was primped this morning by her faithful André, a minor hero in the book, into perky flicks. She looks fresh and well slept, younger than 53, trim waisted with the broad bottom she rails against in her book. On television her frantic animation, the way she clasps your hand with both of hers, the intense, round-eyed gaze, can appear somewhat deranged. But TV tunes out her girlishness and northern warmth.

Cherie-haters often focus upon her mouth. That it is large and constantly moving, with a dissatisfied downward turn in repose seems the outward expression of her perceived flaws: greed, complaining, tactlessness, that she never bloody shuts up. But that same mouth emits a low, mellifluous voice, with a bit of Liverpool in her occasional “everythink”. And it is mostly upturned in a pleasingly gamine smile or emitting a honking, ready laugh, which she partly employs as a stalling tactic when tackling tricky questions.

Listening back to my tape, I realise that I am unusually forceful with her, even rude. I cannot help venting my personal sense of betrayal, and that of many working mother friends. I tell Cherie how delighted we were when she arrived at No 10, that she had kept her name and career, had a marriage of equals, muddled through family life. She was like us with her Ken Dodd morning hair, picking those flowers from her doorstep. But then the “Oh Cherie!” moments began, multiplying towards the end, when we longed to shake her back to sense. To Cherie’s credit, she takes all this rather equably.

Let’s take Carole Caplin, I rant. When you had the choice of every discreet fashion adviser in Britain, why did you trust someone so obviously dodgy? “Carole isn’t dodgy at all,” says Cherie mildly. “In fact, the one thing you can say about Carole is, although Alastair was convinced she was going to do kiss and tell, she has never kissed and told.” But wasn’t she restrained by a gagging clause? “Well,” she splutters, “I hadn’t even thought . . . Yes, it is true Carole had a confidentiality agreement, but so did my nanny and I had to take her to court to enforce it.” (The Blairs’ nanny Ros Mark was injuncted to stop a proposed book about their intimate family life.)

And why did you let her drag you into all that New Age nonsense? “That’s what the press said, but basically I’m a good Catholic girl and I’m not really into New Age nonsense.” What about the crystals? “There was that round one I wore once, but that wasn’t even given to me by Carole but by my sister [who worked for Caplin as a homeopath].” What about the mud rituals? “Pu-lease! What mud rituals?”

But Caplin, she admits, filled the lonely void of never having time in Downing Street to meet genuine old friends. “The good thing about Carole was she was absolutely and totally nonpolitical. She was helping me out three times a week, training at the gym, and I put aside time for that. It was an opportunity to have a girlie chat that you wouldn’t otherwise do,” she says.

“And the other good thing about Carole was she kept me thin. I don’t look bad now, but I tell you, I’m not as thin as I was then.” Which is the crux of the Caplin issue: what woman, desperate to lose that childbearing final stone, wouldn’t cling to the only thing that seemed to work, even if, as Lord Levy claims in his memoirs, rumours abounded that Carole was giving Tony more than a reiki massage.

“I don’t know where he got that from,” Cherie says. “It’s a load of rubbish!” Didn’t it seem odd that your closest friend was touching your naked husband? “But it was my idea for him to have massages because I thought it was good for him to be relaxed.” But Carole was attractive and a noted flirt: “I trusted her and I certainly completely trusted him.”

At least, I say, without Carole you have stopped wearing ghastly white pixie boots. Cherie says that now she feels more confident about her style than the frumpy barrister of 1996 who wore either court suits or slobby leggings and felt so grateful for Caplin’s services. “But these aren’t so bad, are they?” she says and pokes a pointy-toed white shoe from under the table. Clearly Carole cannot be blamed for every fashion faux pas.

And what about those holidays in tacky celebrities’ villas? Why stay at a Bee Gee’s house or with Cliff Richard? Couldn’t you foresee the ghastly headlines? “But I like Cliff!” protests Cherie, who clearly inherited her father’s light entertainment gene. And she admits that, long before they were in politics, friends named the Blairs “house bandits” for their habit of descending every summer on other families’ French or Italian retreats.

“When you’re PM, it’s not just us and the four kids and my mum going on holiday. It is also the three garden girls [the Downing Street secretaries] to do shifts because he has to have a 24-hour office, the comms people to take in secure lines to the White House and No 10, the detectives who come every day with the red boxes . . .”

Couldn’t you just rent from a discreet luxury villa company? They tried that when they visited the Seychelles, she says, but before their holiday newspapers printed pictures, compromising security. “John and Norma [Major] stayed with Tristan Garel-Jones [former Foreign Minister]. Margaret Thatcher used to stay with friends in Switzerland. You have to go to a place which is fairly remote and secure and the people who own those villas don’t tend to rent them out.”

So, as with much in her autobiography, there is a logic to this superficially appalling scheme. Cherie’s earlier book, The Goldfish Bowl, recounts the lives of fellow prime ministerial spouses; all shared a loneliness in No 10, a sense that their identity was utterly subsumed, while they were constantly on public display. But Norma, Denis Thatcher, Clarissa Eden and Mary Wilson all left the goldfish bowl eventually. Threat of terrorism means that although she now travels without personal protection – “Yes, they can’t shoot Tony, but they can shoot me,” she says gaily – Cherie will always live behind its protective glass. After 9/11 the leash tightened: police forbade her from going out without security, picking up her kids from school or popping in and out of chambers, so she worked more from home.

Which makes the Blairs’ property decisions somewhat more explicable. Their London house had to be big enough to contain security detail and home offices for them both. Since it has no private garden and Special Branch see the square garden opposite as sniper alley, a secluded country home means that Tony can take country walks with his children outdoors, as he did at Chequers, the one place the family felt almost free.

After No 10, Cherie’s daily life has changed little. At my request, her assistant sends me pages from her diary and along with “Tesco wine delivery”, “Leo Easter break” and “TB home about 10pm” are the same mix of human rights and women’s issue speeches, charity dinners and legal case work she did before. Only the official functions are gone. The difference is that after having her husband effectively work below their flat for ten years, able to pop in on Leo throughout the day, now she barely sees him. “I think I must be the only person whose husband has a difficult, dangerous and demanding job and goes straight into an equally dangerous job,” she says and I detect sadness.

A prime minister rarely leaves the country for more than three days, but Mr Blair’s role as Middle East envoy entails almost perpetual travel. I meet Cherie on what is her husband’s 55th birthday, but they celebrated it two days earlier – Kathryn came round, they cooked a roast – because today he flies abroad for ten days. “I hope all this travelling is not forever, just while he’s getting settled into his new job. I know Leo misses him. Tony has always been such a hands-on father.” Leo, “a gift from God”, her late accidental child has eased the sadness of what must seem a very empty nest.

Leo is now almost 8, the older Blair children in their early 20s, with Kathryn this week taking her law exams, her first step towards a planned career at the Bar. Cherie will not discuss their lives, saying that she wishes to protect their privacy, and yet many intimate family photographs are in her book. As when the Blairs put their children on No 10 Christmas cards, this opens them to charges of hypocrisy.

“My father was the Scouse git in‘Til Death us Do Part,” counters Cherie. “Of course he didn’t live with us, but I was very conscious as a child about the difficulties of having a famous father. [She was taunted at school about his infidelities.] And I didn’t want my children to have all the disadvantages of having a famous father and not feeling that they at least participated in and had the pluses of that.

“And I wanted to have my children photographed going into No 10 to show we were doing this as a family. It wasn’t something Tony was imposing upon the rest of us.”

A charity has asked her to sum up her life in six words. She is considering “Daughter of, mother of, wife of” and, thinking that she is making a sardonic point about how women are perceived, I say that now she is freer to be something more. “That is certainly true,” she says, “but in my heart of hearts, there isn’t anything better than being, certainly, ‘mother of’. I think that one’s finest achievement has to be your family.”

In the book Fiona Millar, Cherie’s former adviser, tells her to stop doing anything except being a barrister and a mother since any attempt to create a political role for herself just fuelled criticism. I ask why she did not simply remain the independent Cherie Booth we had first admired. “My job is being a QC,” she says. “But my job is also to support Tony. The truth is he is happier and better when I’m with him.”

Suddenly Cherie was forbidden to voice political opinions and while Tony debated global issues with G8 leaders she joined the other first wives touring a tartan factory. Inevitably the dynamic of their relationship shifted. “In our marriage we don’t have a No 1 and a No 2, it is much more of an equal partnership. But in Downing Street, the PM is No 1 and everything revolves around him and the system wasn’t used to having someone like me who was working for a living.

“And you cannot say to your husband, I’ve done the dinner and you said you were going to be here at 7pm and I’ve rushed home from work and Leo was waiting for you to read to him. Because he’d say ‘I’m sorry, but I was on the phone to President Bush’ or whatever, and you can’t really say that isn’t a good excuse. It isn’t like he was drinking with his mates!”

Hillary Clinton once told Cherie that a woman in public life is always damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. It could be the title of Cherie’s autobiography. Call yourself Booth and refuse to attend state functions and you are a stroppy feminist; become Mrs Blair and go to G8 and you are grabbing the glory. Take no heed of your appearance and they will say you look a fright; take a personal hairdresser to summits and you are vain.

André Suard was at the centre of a row during the 2004 election when she billed the Labour Party for his services but on all government occasions Cherie paid for his air fare, accommodation and services. “Never in my life have I seen such a spectacle as these official visits and you have at least to look respectable. I can’t claim to look like Carla Bruni, but at least you need to look well groomed.”

Cherie’s autobiography runs to more than 400 pages although, I remark, it is not as big as Alastair Campbell’s. “My ego is not as big as Alastair’s!” she roars. But it is not insubstantial. Although she wishes to present her book as a tale of women’s progress – how her life differed from the struggles of her mother and grandmother – it is not without score settling. Derry Irvine (now Lord Irvine of Lairg), her first boss, comes over as a drunken, sexist monster, Campbell as a blustering bully, Anji Hunter, the former head of government relations, as bossy and patronising. Lord Irvine’s memoirs say that Cherie was threatened by Ms Hunter’s long friendship with Mr Blair and their shared comfortable, middle-class backgrounds.

Cherie says that the pair clashed over Tony’s diary, but she has never doubted her husband’s devotion. “The interesting thing about Tony and me is that we are different. It is more interesting than being with someone similar. We spark off each other. We find each other challenging.”

So as prospective chatelaine of two grand houses, are her money anxieties finally over? “I suppose so, yes,” she says. “But coming from my background, I don’t think I will ever feel secure about money, because I lived in a household which never fell into abject poverty, but we were always on the line. I think one has to remember that I know what it is like to get to the end of the week and have no money left. And sometimes Tony teases me about being silly about whether we can afford things or not.” So why does the Blairs’ new wealth provoke such opprobrium? “I think it is the whole class thing,” she says. “We don’t want our politicians, particularly our Labour ones, to do well.”