AUTOBIOGRAPHY: The recollections of the former British prime minister's wife reveal a woman who desperately wanted to be seen as the 'first lady' of the UK
WHEN LITTLE Cherie Booth was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up she used to say "prime minister!" Reading her autobiography, you can't help thinking that she never changed her mind. From the time her husband Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, she battled for a public role for herself, when she had been neither elected nor employed.
She makes a small attempt to present her assumption of a public role as unwilling, but she fought for it. She fought the prime minister's office, she fought the Foreign Office. But the model of the "first family" is in reality a monarchical throwback, persisting in the US, for instance, where the president is head of state.
In Britain, they had the queen and the endless royal family and they didn't need her. When she quotes her press adviser, Fiona Millar, as telling her that she should, "Go back to being a mother and a barrister and nothing more. The press all hate you", this reader, at least, thinks it was good advice.
But she didn't. And she, Tony and, God bless them, the children became part of the identity of post-Thatcher Britain. Cherie says Tony spoke of an "atmosphere of negativity" that hung over the UK when he took office, and his great achievement was fronting up a new, modern, progressive Britain.
Cherie, the equal, high-achieving wife, was part of that, a companion piece to Hillary Clinton in the US, and I remember cheering along. But when you examine Cherie's role, you realise it was no feminist landmark. She had achieved Cherie Booth QC, but she wanted Cherie Blair, First Lady.
Her opinions seem to be mere reactions, rather than signals of any intellectual depth. On Iraq, which undid her husband - not to mention a rather large number of civilians and combatants - her response was blind support. As she says to her press adviser, "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."
Blairite Labour politics as a whole seem to constitute here no more than reactions to Old Labour and Old Conservative. Tony had decided that from now on the US was a good thing, and Cherie was with him all the way. It seems that all Bill Clinton had to do was throw a big dinner for them in 1998 and the job was Oxo: "There we were, lined up beside the President and the First Lady of America, shaking hands with America's finest . . . Sitting there, with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes both very much in evidence, I still remember the feeling of awe."
She'd come a long way, baby. She was born in Liverpool in 1954; her mother was soon abandoned by her husband, the actor Tony Booth, who later became famous in Till Death Us Do Part. Her mother was forced to raise her two girls in her mother-in-law's home, at one point working split shifts in a chipper that allowed her out to feed and water the children.
Grandma Booth had to make her few quid stretch. A formidable matriarch, she would frequently send Cherie and her sister back to the local shops with shoddy merchandise and the line "Mrs Booth is not satisfied". Cherie admits she is her grandmother all over again.
Old Labour reforms allowed her to fight her way through to the London School of Economics and on to the Bar, where she came first in her year. The innocence with which she still trumpets this fact 30 years on shows what a struggle it was. She still seems stuck in first gear, and it's not surprising.
What seems like an obsession with money is fairly understandable too, but very unattractive. Having been in No 10 means they haven't been "on the property ladder", she complains - they have a mortgage "the size of Mount Snowdon", and no doubt this book is part of the hike up. Interestingly, it is his refusal to take a 26 per cent pay rise that fuels one of the book's early outbursts against Gordon Brown.
Her very obviousness is winning in its way, except when it comes to her comments about the current prime minister. How could she seek to undermine a Labour prime minister who is fighting for his life? Her main complaint is that he wanted Blair's job, but she gets so petty as to complain that he wanted the best office: "We weren't the only ones who noticed he put himself first." She complains, pettily again, that Brown just didn't understand he had to accept Blair's package of right-leaning reforms on academy schools, foundation hospitals and pensions and then Blair would stand down. But maybe Brown had good reason not to accept them. Cherie's socialism at times looks very like Thatcherism - work hard and you'll be rewarded. In fact, the book illustrates how Blairism was a social democratic development of Thatcherism.
Neither does Cherie's Catholicism seem to amount to much more than wearing the shirt of the opposing team. Although she says that the Blairs' socialism has Christian roots, her response when she meets the Pope seems more telling: " . . . my emotions ran away with me when I thought of how proud my grandma would have been. All those admonitions to behave, to learn my catechism, had not been in vain." And no, Cherie, who as a girl kept three men on the go, didn't have a baby at 45, and a miscarriage at 48, because she was a Catholic. And though much has been made of the fact that Leo was conceived because she was scared the Balmoral staff would unpack her contraceptive equipment and didn't bring it, I think he'll get over it. He was conceived because, although we may not like the Blairs, they certainly like each other.
You won't get great writing in this book, but you do, I think, get authenticity. The passages that detail the Blairs' romance and those that describe the amazing experience of Tony becoming prime minister are a great read, in the manner of "a reader's true experience" in a woman's magazine. And who doesn't read those?
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Victoria White is a writer and journalist
Speaking for Myself By Cherie Blair Little, Brown, 421pp. £18.99