Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask
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world/politics/blair-pope-is-wrong-about-gays-
ndash-and-most-catholics-think-so-too-1665363.html
19 The Guardian, 13 May 2009: http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/belief/2009/may/13/tony-blair-faith-foundation
20 www.catholicactionuk.blogspot.co.uk, 5 December 2008: http://catholicactionuk.blogspot.co.uk/
2008/12/dossier-on-cherie-blair.html
21 The Catholic Universe, 18 September 2014: http://www.thecatholicuniverse.com
/priest-tells-rochdale-inquiry-horrific-abuse-school-4174
22 Independent, 8 April 2009: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
news/article-1370323/Tony-Blairs-priest-fixed-papal-
knighthoods-cash.html
23 http://www.allindiaimamorganization.org/about-umer-ilyasi.html [page no longer available]
24 www.berkleycenter.georgetown.edu, 1 July 2010: http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/interviews/a-
discussion-with-bishop-josiah-fearon-of-kaduna
25 www.ynaija.com, 22 December 2013: http://www.ynaija.com/corruption-worse-
than-homosexuality-bishop-of-kaduna-speaks/
26 http://www.centralsynagogue.org/
about_us/our_clergy/rubinstein
27 Observer, 14 March 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/
mar/14/tony-blair-faith-foundation-america
28 Ibid.
29 www.huffingtonpost.com, 5 November 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
charles-andrew-flamiano/letting-go-letting-god-
faith-shorts-finalist_b_2134803.html
30 Daily Mirror, 28 February 2014: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rupert-murdoch-
donated-100000-tony-3190828#ixzz3CGpWUzlk
31 http://www.washingtonindependent.com/86305/
but-really-would-joe-lieberman-ever-criticize-israel
32 New Yorker, 10 May 2010: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/
2010/05/10/the-influencer
33 www.tabletmag.com, 14 May 2010: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/
33826/will-israel%E2%80%99s-%
E2%80%98rich-uncle%E2%80%99-buy-%
E2%80%98newsweek%E2%80%99
34 Sunday Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/to-ny-blair/9859780/Revealed-Tony-
Blair-and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html
35 www.interpipe.biz, 24 October 2012: http://www.interpipe.biz/en/
media/newsone/58S
36 http://tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/foundation/
news/tony-blair-announces-new-education-projects-ukraine [page no longer available]
37 Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/tony-blair/9859780/Revealed-Tony-Blair-
and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html
38 The Times, 12 October 2013: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/law/article3892816.ece
39 Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/politics/tony-blair/9859780/Revealed-
Tony-Blair-and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html
40 Spectator, 17 September 2012: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/
2012/09/britain-should-call-for-reform-of-existing-blasphemy-laws/
41 www.liberalconspiracy.org, 3 July 2013: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/07/03/excl-tony-
blairs-office-once-agains-caught-not-paying-interns/
42 http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/sports/
43 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 18 March 2011: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org
/news/entry/join-team-tbsf-in-running-jogging-
or-even-walking-the-great-north-run-and-h/
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FAMILY FORTUNES
‘While this venture is a commercial one, it is not about replacing the NHS or profiteering.’
– CHERIE BLAIR ON HER PRIVATE HEALTHCARE BUSINESS.
After Tony Blair’s last appearance in Parliament, the Blair family came out of 10 Downing Street, and Blair, smiling, got into the back of the waiting Daimler, on the side nearer the home he was vacating. Cherie came round the other side, stunning in purple, and turned for a moment to wave at the world’s media; and she said, ‘Bye. I don’t think I’ll miss you.’
Blair was furious, as Cherie records in her autobiography:
Sitting there in the back of the Daimler, Tony stony-faced beside me, I stared out of the window as we passed the Cenotaph. He was right to be angry … leaving was to be done on his terms and was to be done with dignity and grace, and what I had just done was neither gracious nor dignified … I sat beside him feeling both foolish and small.
And so, with Cherie’s help, the incident contributed to the general impression of Blair as the charming, socially adept man, and Cherie as the gauche and accident-prone female partner. This fiction would not have survived if the world’s media had been in Hampshire a week later, in the magnificent garden of Charles Powell’s Hampshire home. In fact, this story is made public here for the first time.
The very upper-crust Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, had acted as Prime Minister Blair’s special envoy to Brunei – controversially, because Powell was also on the payroll of BAE Systems, and the company was in dispute with Brunei over the purchase of three warships. One of his brothers is Chris Powell, once Labour’s favourite advertising man, and another is Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff in Downing Street, who became the chief consultant of Tony Blair Associates. Charles pronounces his surname to rhyme with hole, but Chris and Jonathan pronounce it to rhyme with towel.
The occasion was a party to celebrate Jonathan’s marriage to the journalist Sarah Helm, and Sarah made a speech containing a graceful and witty reference to her presence on the anti-Iraq War march. Then, with Cherie seated at the table nearby finishing her dessert, Blair rose.
‘Hi, everybody,’ he said. ‘So now you all know why I decided to resign as Prime Minister. I thought it was time to give Jonathan back to Sarah.’ Then, turning to the happy couple, he added, ‘Anyway, Jonathan was never any good in bed.’
‘There was a kind of nervous semi-silence,’ one of the guests told us. ‘It was so wrong on so many levels. We all tried not to look at Cherie, or Jonathan, or Sarah.’
CHERIE
Cherie Blair is much more socially and politically adept, and much faster on her feet, than people give her credit for – perhaps more than she gives herself credit for. One of us (Beckett) once asked her to sign his copy of her book on prime ministers’ wives. It happened at the same time as our book on Tony Blair’s premiership was out, and the Blairs, with some justice, considered it hostile. She wrote on the cover sheet, ‘To Francis. I promise this is not fiction. Cherie Blair.’ She had barely a second to think. It was quick, witty and clever.
Today the Blairs live very separate lives. As the two stories at the start of this chapter illustrate, by the time they left Downing Street they had lost that instinctive feel for each other that they must once have had. The business empires of Tony and Cherie Blair are separate, and the couple do not work together. They are seldom seen together.
Middle East sources have told us that, during the two to three days a month Tony spends in the region, Cherie is never there. She does go to the region herself, for her own business, always at times when he is not there. None of the Middle East correspondents we spoke to had seen the Blairs together.
Neighbours in Connaught Square report the same thing. Cherie is seen a lot in the square, wandering around the huge house, going to the odd community event, and looking depressed. Tony is seldom seen, and the two are never seen together. People who have worked for the Blair organisation, including Martin Bright, confirmed for us that the Blairs are seldom seen together.
What is going on, we understand, is the disintegration of their once very close marriage. When we heard that lawyers may have been consulted with a view to a divorce, we put it to two people who know the Blairs very
well. The first paused for a very long time, refused the option of denying the story, and said, ‘I can only say that, if Cherie were contemplating that, Tony would do everything he possibly could to dissuade her.’ The other said, ‘There has been talk of a divorce for a long time but she’ll never do it. Her hatred of the media would be greater than her hatred of his affairs.’ This person assumed that the rumours of affairs are true, though Blair never personally comments on them except to deny them.
There is also, of course, the fact that they are both Catholics and their church forbids divorce, but their Catholicism is sufficiently flexible for him to overcome that obstacle.
How has it come to this?
The Downing Street years took their toll on the marriage. Many politicians and friends of the Blairs have told us that, in Downing Street, she had a thoroughly raw deal, pilloried by the press as a surrogate for her husband and not protected by his spin doctors, who gave priority to protecting the PM.
She was persuaded against her better judgement to take a prominent role in Blair’s public life. She would rather have concentrated on her legal career, but she was forced into the role of consort, for which she was not at all suited.
Perhaps she was all the things the media said she was: a bit too greedy for the trappings of power, for the access to freebies. But it was not just the media that turned on her. It was the relentless Downing Street New Labour machine as well. She was used as a lightning rod for Blair.
The rumours of Tony Blair having affairs with other women have not helped, although Blair’s office has consistently denied them.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, to whom Blair has been close ever since 1994, filed for divorce from his very much younger wife Wendi Deng in June 2013, and believes that Blair alienated her affections. Murdoch is thought to have confided in his daughter Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, PR man Matthew Freud. The one thing we know for certain is that the once close relationship between Murdoch and Blair has broken down completely.
Blair telephoned an old business associate in the US in 2014 and assured him that he was not having an affair with Wendy Deng. But the business associate, who also knows Murdoch well, told him that Murdoch thought it was true, and that Murdoch did not believe the denials. That much, at least, is certain. Whether or not Blair has been having an affair with his wife, Murdoch believes he has.
This matters terribly to Blair. It will not affect how the British perceive him, but he has pretty well given up hope of salvaging his reputation here. It does affect how the Americans see him, partly because extramarital affairs are more damaging there, but principally because it will destroy his relationship with Murdoch and NewsCorp, which he has nurtured so carefully ever since 1994. His reputation in America is desperately important to him.
CHERIE AND LAUREN BOOTH
Cherie is also now much taken up with the tangled affairs of her own family, stemming mostly from the untidy life lived by her father, the actor Tony Booth. They are a turbulent family – one of her ancestors was John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln. Tony Booth has eight daughters who have three different mothers, and the poverty of Cherie’s childhood was harder to bear because she knew her father was making money as an actor. Nonetheless, Cherie takes a lot of trouble with her now elderly and frail father, and he for his part was quoted in October 2010 as saying that he would do anything for Cherie.
In the same Daily Mail interview, he said he did not love Cherie’s half-sister Lauren Booth.1 ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again. I suspect not,’ the actor told the paper. He sneered at her conversion to Islam, and attacked ‘the things she said about Cherie and Tony, which were unforgiveable’. She had been sent a belated email to tell her of his 2010 stroke, but she had not been in touch, he said.
Few things are as simple as they look. When we spoke to Lauren, two years later, she had never seen the email and did not know her father had had a stroke until we told her.
Lauren had certainly embarrassed Prime Minister Blair by her outspoken attacks on his policies, but so had Tony Booth himself. He made no secret of the fact that he considered that Blair’s government was damaging the welfare state.
When Lauren was a journalist in London, regularly attacking Prime Minister Blair’s policies from the left and finally irretrievably falling out with him over Iraq, there were newspaper stories saying that she was trading on her relationship with Cherie, a relationship which they said had never been close. None of this was true, and the stories were often under the bylines of journalists known to be close to the New Labour spin machine.
In fact, Lauren was a good writer and broadcast performer, quite capable of making her own way in journalism, though the relationship with Cherie did her career no harm. And she and Cherie were close. Right up to 1997, when he became Prime Minister, she was very close to Blair as well – she says she ‘loved him to bits’ in those days.
When Tony Booth nearly burned to death in 1979 by falling into a drum of paraffin during a drunken attempt to get into his locked flat, Tony Blair was a great support to the family, says Lauren.
But Lauren Booth and Tony Blair have not spoken for more than a decade now. Lauren has become a Muslim and a Palestinian activist. Tony Booth suggests in his Mail interview that she did this only to embarrass Blair, but this is not at all likely: she defends her position with detailed knowledge and genuine passion, and is very much on the side of the moderate, tolerant Muslims.
Before all that, in 2000 she and her actor husband Craig Darby and their two daughters went to live in France. After a few years, she told Darby she was going to leave him. The next day he received serious head injuries in a motorbike accident. In the years since then, she has moved back to Britain, become a Muslim, watched her husband recover with agonising slowness, and fought a long and bitter battle with him over custody of their two daughters. At one stage she was taken to court and accused of kidnapping her children. She won, and kept the children, but it cost her £50,000, and the custody battle was still going on when we spoke to her in 2014.
Desperate to raise the money, she turned to Cherie, who lent her £15,000. But Cherie was insistent that it was a loan, and Lauren ultimately could not repay it in time. She petitioned for her own bankruptcy, and the order was made on 10 December 2010.
Lauren found asking Cherie for money very hard. Cherie’s childhood has left her very careful about money. She is very wealthy now of course, but, however much she has, it never seems to be enough to bring her peace.
She feels, we’re told, that she made her life, she went through hardship to put herself through grammar school, that ‘she’ll always be that grammar school girl toiling over her homework.’
The struggle to get by intensified when she studied for the bar, as she recalls in her autobiography:
While everyone else took a break at lunchtime, I stayed in [Lincoln’s Inn library]: reading, making notes and eating my sandwiches … Every week I would buy a loaf and a little round box of Kraft Dairylea with its six triangles of processed cheese wrapped in silver foil. I would keep them on the windowsill and make up one sandwich every day, the cheese getting softer and softer as the summer built up to a heat wave. It was all I could afford.
Greg Dyke tells a story of how, when he was a director of Manchester United in the late 1990s, Cherie telephoned him from Downing Street to ask if he could get her discounted United shirts for her children. Dyke said she could have them free. She replied that she could not take them without payment as they would have to be declared as a gift – but she would like a discount, please.
Lauren still has a high regard for her half-sister, though the business of the loan put a strain on their relationship. She calls her ‘a woman of great integrity and loyalty’. When Lauren came across a case of a sixteen-year-old Afghan girl in Britain facing a forced marriage, she told Cherie and ‘Cherie got on with it straightaway – I left it with her.’
Cherie communicates with her family in terse text messages: ‘
RU OK God bless.’ ‘She’s not mean, she’s not hard-hearted. She might be a bit brusque,’ says Lauren, and adds, ‘It’s good that she still cares about me – I’ve given her a lot of grief over the years.’
Lauren told us she admires the work of Cherie’s Foundation for Women, though regretting its strong focus on Israel – ‘There are a lot of poorer areas around the world.’ The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, set up in 2008, claims to provide women entrepreneurs with access to business development support, networks, finance and technology. At the top of its website is the stern motto, ‘Empowering women, driving growth’.
But that doesn’t mean that just because you’re a woman entrepreneur you can apply to it for help. The Foundation told us, ‘We do not accept unsolicited grant applications. Instead, we work together with our local partners to develop projects in line with our mission statement. We work within a global community of organisations aiming to economically empower women and we welcome new knowledge partners.’
The biggest donor is media tycoon Haim Saban, the billionaire who made his fortune from the children’s television programme Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and his wife, Cheryl.
This is the same American Israeli billionaire who funds the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and, as we have seen, says, ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.’
So it is hardly surprising to find Cherie’s Foundation to be very active in Israel, nor to find Cherie herself going there with Cheryl Saban to talk up their funding of places at Western Galilee College for women to study economics, accounting and business administration, and providing women in Israeli business with capital and mentors.
Compared with her husband’s charities, Cherie’s charity is an open book. It does list donors in its annual report, but it does not put amounts, so that the reader does not know who the big money donors are. The list, naturally, includes JP Morgan. It also includes big commercial names such as Exxon Mobil. Perhaps surprisingly, it also includes USAID, whose purpose is to ‘provide economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States.’2