SHE'S HARDLY A NON- POLITICAL WIFE

Peter Hitchens, the Daily Express man who

fell foul of New Labour for inquiring too much about Mrs Blair, defends himself

PEOPLE RING me up and say they want to beat me to a pulp. I am, they tell me, a grubby specimen of pond life digging dirt, a snarling attack dog of gutter journalism.

John Humphrys has subjected me to trial by the Today programme (verdict first, evidence afterwards, lip audibly curled). An unpopular Sunday newspaper has unearthed imaginary details of my record as a window-breaking revolution- ary. Guardian readers have been pestering me with spittle-flecked and obscene tele- phone calls, undermining forever their reputation as peace-loving, vegetarian nuclear-free folk.

What have I done? I have tried to find out what Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Booth, said during her election campaign in coastal Kent almost 13 years ago. I am uninterested in her blameless private life. But I justify my interest in her politics in several ways. The first point is the obvious one — that she and her husband are both political animals who are bound to influence each other's think- ing. Secondly, the information I am seeking would not exist if Ms Booth had not stood for Parliament, a highly public act which ought to be open to examination in a free society. Thirdly, you do not have to be an MP to be a politician. Ms Booth has devel- oped an interest in a highly political branch of the law, and has taken to speaking in public, from Labour Party platforms, on con- troversial subjects.

My attackers behave as if I were a hairy bully with a nailed club pursuing a huge- eyed baby seal across an ice floe, even though the baby seal in question is a for- mer parliamentary candidate, a QC with an estimated income of £250,000 a year and a potential High Court judge.

But this outrage is all for show, a myth created to inflame the prejudices of dim- mer Labour supporters. My real offence is far more serious and I am being punished personally for it in a slightly sinister fash- ion. For I have broken one of the strictest taboos of late-1990s Britain — investigat- ing the deep instincts of the New Labour elite on the great issues of our age, as opposed to what they say they think.

I drifted into my life of thought-crime some months ago. I attended a couple of very strange public meetings at which Ms Booth had spoken. Both these gatherings were organised and publicised by the Labour Party, both had rather striking subject matter: child prostitution at one, wife-beating at the other. Her contributions in each case had been care- fully screened to avoid any controversy. But what was most odd was the way she was guarded from contact with the press.

On the first occasion she marched out, flanked by minders, before she could be asked any questions. When I followed her to the stairs and politely tried to speak to her, she adopted a regal posture and acted as if I did not exist. At the second appear- ance, all questions were filtered by the burly Clare Short, again avoiding direct contact. Two things bothered me: why did one of Britain's sharpest lawyers need such heavyweight protection and, if she did not want to face the press, why did she appear as a speaker at public meetings at all?

There was a tantalising hint of radical- ism in the micro-politics of the subjects she had chosen, made more tantalising still by these bizarre and tentative steps into the limelight in her own right. If she had not done so, I do not think I would have gone any further. But this strange attempt to become a semi-public person — with all the advantages but none of the dangers made me wonder what made the Labour Party so nervous about its first lady.

Then I came across a puzzling passage in John Rentoul's biography of Tony Blair. It described Ms Booth's long-forgotten 1983 campaign as Labour candidate in the hope- less seat of Thanet North, and especially a public meeting in Margate, where she 'said she was delighted to be sharing a platform with the two Tonys who have inspired her in her quest for socialism'. This simply didn't fit with the semi-official legend created for Ms Booth elsewhere in Rentoul's book. According to this version, backed up by a well-tuned chorus of long-term friends, she was a super-moderate Blairite before her time, and is now a paragon of apolitical working-motherhood.

For neither of these Tonys was her hus- band, he spent the meeting rather uncom- fortably in the front stalls. They were her actor father, the once famous Randy Scouse Git, Tony Booth, and the Demon King of Old Labour, Tony Benn.

Less than a year before this, during his by-election campaign in Beaconsfield, the young Mr Blair had pointedly refused to have Tony Benn anywhere near him. He had good reason to behave this way. Mr Benn had just split the Party so badly that some thought it would never recover, forc- ing many even on the Left to break with him. Mr Blair would have lost Beaconsfield anyway, so his decision was calculated to benefit his long-term political career. Cherie must have known about it. In that case, her decision to share a platform with Mr Benn looked like an act of conscious political defiance. At the time, she was ahead in the couple's race to get to Westminster. Her husband's selection for Sedgefield was still some weeks ahead, and would surprise them both when it came.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why nobody seemed to have looked into the on-the-record past of this powerful political woman, who at the very least will have the Prime Minister's ear if Labour wins the election, and at the most could be one of his more influential advisers.

Without much optimism, I tried the direct route and asked for an interview. But my request was abruptly turned down by the Blair office. I resolved that, if I couldn't find out what her views are now, perhaps I could discover what they had really been then.

So one snowy day I headed down to Margate, where my only find was a pic- ture of Cherie and Tony Benn together, never previously published. There stood the future QC, her face set in a Spartish expression, dressed and coiffed in a manner to affright Barbara Follett, her hand melodramatically on her hip. Her father was slumped beside her. Mr Benn sat in the foreground, his glasses sliding down his nose. But what was she `I fancy a bit on the other side.' saying? What was she thinking?

The newspaper reports, where they exist- ed, were worse than useless, containing no detail. A search of the library archives drew a blank. A few former activists who spoke to me privately recalled that she had cer- tainly talked a pretty left-wing line, espe- cially at her selection meeting. Anything else would have gone down badly with a local party famed for its radicalism. The one man who had her election address flat- ly refused to show it to me, which made me all the keener to see it.

So I advertised in the Thanet Times and Gazette, asking for 'mementos of Cherie Blair's campaign', copies of her election address and leaflets, and details of speeches she made in Margate or Ramsgate. I invited people to call in confidence, because I knew from experience, that some Labour Party members are dubious about their move- ment's makeover, but might not want all their comrades to know they were helping me.

Suddenly I knew how a vivisectionist must feel when the Animal Liberation peo- ple come after him. Various of Mr Blair's poodles, including Tony Bevins in the Observer and Roy Greenslade in the New Statesman, had snapped feebly at my ankles when the Daily Express published the pic- ture of Cherie and Tony Benn, but these new attacks were serious.

A whole hillside of type in the Guardian was devoted to a hysterical, bed-wetting article about a phantasmal Tory plot to `target' Mrs Blair. It flatteringly referred to me as 'likely to strike fear in Labour's heart', while casually mentioning my years in the International Socialists, now as dis- tant and irrecoverable as the days when I was thin. Similar screeds appeared in the Observer and Sunday Times, I was called up by four separate BBC programmes and tra- duced in my absence on a fifth.

I tried without success to explain to these people that I have changed my mind rather than my image, and therefore have nothing to conceal. To prove the point, I happily volunteered details of my extremist past to all inquirers, and even answered prying questions about my wife and children.

But despite this ego-swelling attention, knew that I was not worth all this fuss. It was my line of enquiry which was worrying Labour's Islington men and women, who fear serious examination because it will show that they are not quite what they seem to be. Their instincts — statist, paci- fist, unsound and selfish on education, appeasing on the Irish question — have not changed much since the 1983 election, and Cherie Booth, reticent radical, symbolises that rather well.

I am only sad that so many of my col- leagues in broadcasting and supposedly serious newspapers are more interested in my days as a Socialist Worker-seller than they are in the packaged fraud called New Labour, and are prepared to join in the attack against an honourable and legiti- mate investigation.