OF COURSE, the big news last week was that Leo Blair was conceived because Cherie Blair was too embarrassed to bring what she called her contraceptive equipment to Balmoral. Poor Leo Blair, this information is going to follow him to his grave, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
For a woman who says that she was apprehensive about telling her older children that she was pregnant in her late 40s, Cherie Blair is very eager to share the details of her private life with the rest of us.
In Britain, furious female critics have responded by affirming, a) their profound surprise that Cherie, a good Catholic, should use contraception at all, and b) the fact that a diaphragm can fit quite snugly into the average handbag, the one receptacle that is not routinely unpacked by servants at Balmoral. If only we were all so knowledgeable about what servants do. I do not think that I have ever seen a servant. Contraceptives, on the other hand, are in Spar.
Cherie further tells us (in her memoirs, Speaking For Myself, published last Thursday, with the good bits serialised last week) that Leo was conceived because of the "bitter cold" at Balmoral. Official diaries show that the Blairs paid their annual visit to Balmoral in 1999 on September 4th and 5th - a season which is sometimes referred to in more northerly parts as Indian Summer. One does glean the impression from Cherie that the Blairs were at it like knives, but this could be a result of her burning desire to achieve in all areas. You would think that the Blairs would have been too tired to raise a smile, what with invading Iraq and buying all those apartments, but no.
Here we have another example of a celebrity stalking the public, publishing contract in hand. It is a little bit like being pursued down the street by a mad person who won't stop talking. As citizens of this great Republic we should offer some prayers of gratitude for the discretion of our own first ladies and first gentlemen.
Although some of us are quite happy to know the interesting circumstances of Leo Blair's conception (absolutely delighted actually, it made my week) and to learn Tony Blair's reaction to news of the pregnancy ("Oh my God, we'll have to tell Alastair"), we are not so eager to learn about the problems encountered by Mrs Blair when she was being delivered of her first son, Euan. A high forceps delivery, she tells us, which left her with a third degree tear. I so do not want to know what a third degree tear is, or how the medical profession decided to calibrate tears in the first place. Enough, already.
Cherie is a bright and sassy woman, and a barrister. But her sense of decorum is activated only by the media. At Euan's birth she seems to have been less upset about the third degree tear than she was by her young husband, who had been a queasy spectator at her bedside, arranging to have her photographed just after the birth by the local newspaper, the Northern Echo. Cherie lay back on the pillows, she tells us, thinking: "I hate this man." But this was to be something of a pattern in their marriage, with Cherie's obstetric history exploited to become headline news first, while now it forms girlie chatter to sprinkle through her account of her life as a very shrewd operator indeed.
Other people seem much more put out by this than she is. When first pregnant she went to her female doctor, only to find she was on holiday. The replacement GP was completely overcome when Cherie told him that she thought she might be pregnant. "The poor man fell to pieces . . . He didn't want to do an internal examination." Eight months later she is smuggled to hospital, where her detectives gamely stick their heads round the door of the labour ward to say hello. "Every one of them looked as if he was going to be sick," she says.
Cherie Blair doesn't do boundaries, but if she did those fences would have to be high. Her daring and aggression still seem to astonish her husband. "You just had to do it, didn't you?" he said to her after she had reduced the sense of gravitas of his departure from Downing Street with a smart remark to the journalists who were hovering outside. But he forgave her "because he loves me".
It is a portrait of an interesting marriage between two ruthless people who were fleeing unhappiness in the families into which they themselves had been born. Tony met Cherie not long after his mother had died. A striking feature of the book is Cherie's constant and insatiable worries about money, surely the legacy of a childhood in which she saw her beautiful and loving mother, Gale, a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained actress, abandoned by her father and reduced to working in a chip shop to make ends meet. Gale's other daughter, Cherie's sister, also became a lawyer. Of such traumatic childhoods are celebrities made. We will have to wait for Leo Blair's memoirs to see if he thinks his mother's attitude towards fame and money was worth it.