The end of a period
Vicki Woods
SPEAKING FOR MYSELF by Cherie Blair Little Brown, £18.99, pp. 422, ISBN 9781408700983 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a meretricious, puzzling and deeply unsatisfactory book and I resent every one of the 12 hours I spent plodding through it on a Sunday. Cherie’s publishers call her ‘insightful’ and ‘funny’, which she ain’t, and they bill the book as the inspiring tale of a clever, indomitable, feminist woman with a fierce sense of justice, a ‘working-class Liverpool girl’, the first in her family to go university, who pulled herself up by her own bootstraps from a hardscrabble Scouse background to the highest in the land.
Fair enough, she did, alongside untold numbers of her lucky postwar generation. She told a poky interviewer (in one of her endless interviews) that ‘my husband was the nice, middle-class public schoolboy; I was the working-class girl from Liverpool’, as though the gap between them was the same as the present-day gap between rich and poor, which it wasn’t. And while she clearly wasn’t born sucking a silver spoon, there were some remarkably toff-y aspects to her life. Yes, her mother ‘worked in a chip-shop’, briefly (so did the millionaire model Agyness Deyn and so — for a week or two — did I), but later she worked as a travel agent and the sisters holidayed swankily in France, Liguria, Ibiza and Romania. Cynics might point out that the second in her family to go to university was her younger sister Lindsey; that her mother went to RADA and her father, Tony Booth, to the Central School. Actors aren’t ‘working-class’, they’re off-piste entirely, classwise. Mrs Blair is 54; she’s been middle-class since her early twenties. One grows tired of retro-Monty Pythonism about other folks’ shoebox roots.
Having read the thing from start to index, I cannot for the life of me see why it was printed or what she is trying to write. Political gossip about who was stabbing whose back in Downing Street is spread pretty thin. My Rise to High Office is a non-story for the wife who rises on her husband’s arm; there is no office (thank heaven) and many officials to militate against such. The tale of ‘an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances’ is one she can’t tell: she worked furiously to prevent the press ‘invading her children’s privacy’ in Downing Street. Now she’s made the decision partially to invade it herself, she only speaks of two at any length: her oldest and youngest sons. She rolls out Euan’s arrest for binge-drinking yet again and notes his quizzing of the Spanish prime minister Aznar on the unraisable subject of Gibraltar. Leo toddles across the pages, charming Clinton and Chirac, and being coached by his nanny to sing the National Anthem to the Queen. Nicky is mentioned occasionally; Kathryn barely at all.
The author was interviewed at length on Woman’s Hour (her memoirs are Book of the Week as well, annoyingly). She kept saying that ‘people I meet tell me they don’t know me, not the real Cherie, so Speaking for Myself is my chance to tell the truth about myself.’ It’s a rare celeb-biog that tells the truths you really want to hear, and I’ve read brighter ones than this: Victoria Beckham’s anonymous ghost writes with breathless brio and style and Katie Price’s (‘Page 3 Jordan’, if you need reminding) makes a much better fist of juggling three lovers at a time. Cherie’s discussions of Blair-on-Blair action are arm-pricklingly coy. ‘A really strong body . . . His eyes were a clear, penetrating blue . . . They seemed to see right through me, to the extent that I could feel a blush rise up from some uncharted part of me and flood my face.’ (Uncharted part? He was her fifth boyfriend.) There are plenty of rude bits, but a bit too much OBGYN for the general reader. When she was at her direct-grant grammar school, ‘Auntie Audrey and I became very close. I even started my periods at her house.’ (They missed that sentence out on Book of the Week). On the birth of her first-born: ‘After an epidural and a high-forceps delivery . . . utterly ghastly, including a third-degree tear . . . there was blood all over the place.’ On her second-born: ‘The moment we got there, I had to dash to the loo and they had to pull me off . . . I was 10 cm dilated.’ Her third was a breech, delivered by Caesarian. I’ll spare you. But she really goes to town on the fourth, historic pregnancy: at her 45th birthday dinner in September 1999, she’d just been appointed to the bench part-time as a recorder; they’d enjoyed a ‘good break at the Strozzis’ in Italy’; Tony was feeling ‘relaxed’ and all the energy he had ‘expended over Kosovo had been worth it’. There was only ‘one little shadow on my immediate horizon: my period. Where was it?’ She had not, as the wide world now knows, ‘packed my contraceptive equipment’ for the weekend at Balmoral. So when Tony got back from Chequers, she ‘showed him the little dipper and explained the significance of the blue line’. Blue lines, red lines, front lines — what a guy! Once he’d grasped the significance, ‘he said we’d have to tell Alastair’. Tony has Alastair, Hilary, Anji, Kate, Liz, Jonathan, Sally — all kinds of dedicated bondservants to help him do his thing. And Gordon’s thing, of course, though Gordon’s thing seems to be countering Tony’s thing. Poor Cherie has nobody to help her do her thing, apart from Fiona (Alastair’s partner), who becomes very naggy about Iraq throughout late 2002 and early 2003. ‘Why don’t you just tell Tony to stop it?’
My response to her was always the same. ‘Listen, Fiona, I don’t see the papers, I don’t see what he and Alastair see, and if Tony tells me, as he does, that if we don’t stop Saddam Hussein the world will be a more dangerous place, then I believe him. And in my view you and I should be supporting our men in these difficult decisions, not making it worse by nagging them.’
I don’t know. When feminists fall out . . .
Why this book was written was to get Cherie’s slaps in first, I suppose. At naggy Fiona, at ‘the press and its relentless campaign to paint me as a grasping, scheming embarrassment’. To give us the ‘truth’ about the real Cherie, who braced and bolstered the man she loved when all around him were scheming and betraying and being found unhelpfully dead while Tony was on his world round-trip to Tokyo, Korea and China. She says she wrapped her arms around Tony when he crouched down among Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles’ installation in Beijing.
He was desperate . . . ‘You are a good man’, I told him. ‘And God knows your motives are pure, even if the consequences are not as you had hoped.’
Really? She said that? Unfortunately I don’t trust her recall. Anyone who attempts to read this lumpen tome should note the disclaimer at the front. (She’s a lawyer, remember):
My memory is not infallible, and this is not a history book. It is simply one woman’s attempt to recollect her life — a memoir of someone who, for a time, had a walk-on part in history.
Her last act was the walk-off, last June, where she chose to wreck her husband’s plan to exit with grace and dignity by shouting, ‘Bye! I won’t miss you!’ at the press pack. When she got into the Jag for their final ride, Tony was furious.
‘You can’t resist it, can you?’, Tony said through clenched teeth as the door closed behind me. ‘For God’s sake, you’re supposed to be dignified, you’re supposed to be gracious.’
This anecdote is annoying for two reasons. The first is that public chippiness from wives of famous men is always unlovely. The second is that she didn’t say: ‘I won’t miss you’ but ‘We won’t miss you’, meaning we, Team Blair, Cherie and Tony. I’ve checked it on the BBC video. Did she deliberately change it? Or did she misremember? It’s only on page 2 of 422 pages, so I’d really like to know.
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