Speaking for Myself

by Cherie Blair

  As an undergraduate, I had been lucky enough to spend three years in residence halls, but “home” was now a hideous bed-sit in Weech Road, West Hampstead. The one time my grandma came down to see me — bringing some pots and pans she thought I might need — she cried her eyes out because she thought it was so awful. For her, cleanliness was everything, and I can see her now, peering round the bathroom door, nearly apoplectic. London water is notoriously full of iron, and the combination of lime scale and rust made everything in the plumbing line look disgusting. Elsewhere, the bed-sit was the usual thing for those days: dirty linoleum; peeling paint; windows you couldn’t see out of; electric and gas meters into which you’d put a coin and which would always run out at the worst possible moment. I shared a couple of gas rings on the landing with another girl, and I didn’t have a fridge; I kept anything that needed to be refrigerated on my windowsill.

  At the LSE there had been a fair sprinkling of women, but the Bar was still overwhelmingly masculine. That year was the first time the number of women at Lincoln’s Inn exceeded 10 percent. During the formal dinners there, a group of us tended to sit together, and I was the only girl.

  The main way of learning to be a barrister is by watching and helping an experienced junior barrister, known as a pupil master. In those days this was very much a hit-and-miss affair. Some pupil masters took their teaching duties seriously; others saw their pupils as unpaid servants. Of all the specialties, commercial law is the most lucrative, but I had already decided it was not for me. In the end I opted for employment law. I thought it would be intellectually challenging, and from a career perspective it had one overriding advantage: it was all very new, so there was a real shortage of people doing it.

  When I consulted the professor who had taught me employment law about pupil-master possibilities, he told me that very few practitioners were holding themselves out as employment lawyers, and he could recommend only three names.

  One of them was Alexander Irvine, more usually known as “Derry,” and he was anything but a traditional barrister. He was larger than life: overweight, bullish, and blunt. Derry spun me the line that he was a down-to-earth, working-class boy who’d gone to Glasgow University and somehow ended up at Cambridge. In many ways I understood where he was coming from.

  Because you shadow your pupil master for a year, the relationship is crucially important. Pupil masters form the core of your professional life. If things go well, you hope to be taken on — given tenancy, as it’s called — in the same set of chambers, so developing a good personal relationship is crucial.

  The interview with Derry didn’t start well.

  The first thing he said was “Why are you wearing that dress?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. It was dark blue with a paisley pattern, and I had been rather pleased with it. I was very thin in those days, and as it was ruched round the waist, it made the most of my not-very-curvy figure.

  “Don’t you know lady barristers are supposed to wear black and white?”

  I remember thinking, What a nerve! It’s all right for you with all your money, but this is the only smart dress I’ve got, and I have to wear it for other things besides being interviewed by pompous barristers.

  What I actually said was “Well, this is the only decent dress I’ve got, and I bought it especially for interviews. So sorry it isn’t black.”

  It clearly did me no harm, as he offered me a pupilage there and then, or as he put it, “Okay, you can start in July.”

  “And just one more minor thing,” he added as I was leaving. “I’ve half-promised this place to somebody else, some fellow from Oxford.” Then he paused and gave me a broad smile. “But don’t you worry about that. I’ll get rid of him, and I’ll take you instead.”

  I had won an entrance scholarship to Lincoln’s Inn, but there were also major scholarships intended to help fund the year of pupilage. Once again the blue paisley dress was dusted down, and on the appointed day I found myself in the anteroom sitting next to another scholarship hopeful. His suit was far less appropriate than my blue dress, I decided, being made of some kind of tweed, an old-fashioned thing complete with cuffs. He had obviously been privately educated in what the British rather confusingly call a public school, which is anything but. Equally obviously, he had just had his hair cut. As there were only the two of us sitting there, I decided to break the silence.

  “I think we must have names close to each other,” I said by way of introduction. “My name’s Cherie Booth.”

  “Then I’ll be going in before you,” he said. “Tony Blair.”

  He smiled — a wide, broad smile. His voice wasn’t as public school as I thought it would be from his appearance. Indeed, there was a slight accent I couldn’t place. Only later did I realize that it was a hint of Scottish left over from his time at Fettes College, a boarding school just outside Edinburgh.

  We talked for a few minutes, then I asked him whether he had got pupilage yet.

  “Yes, thank goodness. Two Crown Office Row. Derry Irvine. What about you?”

  For once in my life I was speechless. I was about to say something when he was called in.

  Chapter 6

  Brief Encounter

  In order to boost my limited income I had taken a part-time post teaching law at the Polytechnic of Central London. In the spring and summer of 1976, I spent most of my nonteaching hours in the Lincoln’s Inn library. While everyone else took a break at lunchtime, I stayed: reading, making notes, and eating my sandwich. Even with the money I got from teaching, I had to eke things out. Every week I would buy a loaf of bread and a little round box with six triangles of processed cheese wrapped in silver foil. I would keep them out 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.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, my lunchtime eating habits were being watched.

  “You know, Tony Blair quite fancies you,” an odd but clever chap called Charles Harpum told me one evening as we were dining in the Great Hall — one of the obligatory twelve dinners, an old tradition dating back to the sixteenth century — the only times I would have what my grandma would call a proper meal.

  “How could he? I don’t even know him.”

  “Well, he thinks he knows you.”

  A few days later I heard the same thing from Bruce Roe, one of my regular Great Hall dining companions.

  I wasn’t interested. I already had a boyfriend. In fact, I had two: David in Liverpool and John in London. John was another Lincoln’s Inn habitué. John knew about David, but David had no idea about John. It might seem odd that a girl with my Catholic upbringing was being so flighty. But fornication is a bit like contraception: most Catholics do it as much as anyone else; you can always go to confession. (To be frank, however, I have never confessed to fornication. Perhaps one day in my old age I will: “Father, forgive me. I am trying to be sorry for it, but I still find it quite difficult!”) Nor did it seem that terrible then. We were living in different times, post-Pill and pre-AIDS.

  The summer after Bar Finals, John and I managed to go away on holiday. We had a week in Corfu, which in those days was totally unspoiled. When it was over, I went back to Liverpool and had another holiday, this time with David and my mum. Mum had become very fond of David, and there was an assumption by both families, his mother included, that he and I would marry.

  During the autumn of 1975, I gave this possibility some long, hard thought. David had always planned to be a solicitor and was expecting me to go back to Liverpool once I’d done my Bar Finals. If I did, that would be the end of a London-based career, and my instincts told me that if I really wanted to do employment law, I wasn’t going to be able to do that in Liverpool.

  I finished my exams at the end of June, and the following Monday I started work with Derry. Most people didn’t begin their pupilage till the results were out and they’d officially been called to the Bar, but
there seemed little point in my going back to Liverpool. Why look for a job up there when I could be getting on with it down here?

  Derry’s chambers were in 2 Crown Office Row, a Georgian terrace in the area of London known as the Temple, between Fleet Street and the Thames. The building had been bombed during the Second World War and had been rebuilt in an approximation of the original style, but with the addition of an elevator. There were no computers, no typewriters even, except in the clerks’ rooms. In the squares outside, bat-winged barristers flitted round and gathered in corners, carrying piles of paper tied with pink tape like parcels. Only the occasional ringing of a telephone would remind me that I was living in the twentieth century. Barristers were referred to as Mr. or Miss by the clerks, while we called them by their Christian names, even if they had been in the job all their lives and earned more money than a successful senior counsel. The chief clerk was named David. His formidable wife, Cassie, did the books — one of the few women you saw regularly around the building. There were about sixteen tenants in the chambers, of whom two were women, but their practice wasn’t deemed as good as the men’s because commercial solicitors (who made the big money) would never take them seriously.

  About three weeks into July, the Bar Finals results came out, and by nine o’clock in the morning, I was already at the Council of Legal Education in Gray’s Inn. People were several deep trying to find their names on the board, where they were listed alphabetically. I found “Blair, A.,” but no “Booth, C.”

  I was standing there feeling bewildered — could I really have failed completely? — when up came Charles Harpum, the chap who had told me that Tony Blair fancied me. Charles was a highflier who’d got the top First from Cambridge. He was not exactly a friend, but I used to dine with him quite regularly, and we would talk for hours on the law.

  “Well, Cherie, I must congratulate you,” he said, with an odd expression on his face.

  “It would be nice if I could just find my name,” I replied.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You’ve come top.”

  He grabbed my shoulder and propelled me toward the end board, where the top names had been put. And there it was, “Booth, C.,” the first name on the list. The blood, which had previously descended into the pit of my stomach, came surging up to my face. I could feel myself going bright red. Everyone had assumed it would be Harpum who’d finish on top: public school, Cambridge, and so on. And now, here I was, the grammar-school girl from Liverpool and the LSE.

  I ran all the way to Crown Office Row to tell Derry. Next thing he was crowing to everyone about how clever he was to have discovered this pupil who was so brilliant. Somehow or other it was his achievement. It wouldn’t be the last time that somebody else’s success would miraculously turn out to be Derry’s.

  Kudos are one thing, but for me there was a distinct practical advantage in coming top: I was the first recipient of the Ede & Ravenscroft Prize. Ede & Ravenscroft is where you get your wig and gown, and as these were essential items, I’d already had my head measured for my wig and been fitted for the gown, though I still had no idea how I was going to pay for them. Now I wouldn’t have to, because they would be free. In addition, I got a black and gold wig box, with my name printed in gold letters, which I certainly wouldn’t have bothered buying. Also included in the prize was a blue bag with a drawstring, with my initials embroidered in white, which was traditionally used for carrying robes (although in truth I have only ever used it for laundry).

  Our ceremony took place a few weeks later, and David came down with my mum and grandma. Because he was being called to the Bar at the same time, John was there as well. Knowing what the situation was, he kept well out of the way. I had invited my dad, but there was some crisis, not entirely unexpected, and he couldn’t come. In a way I was pleased; I didn’t want any unhappiness for my mum. It was all thanks to her that I had got this far.

  A week or so before the swearing in, I’d been asked to provide details as to how I’d be introduced. The form asked for my father’s name and occupation, but I crossed it out and wrote my mother’s name and occupation instead. I wasn’t going to have her stand there and hear me being called to the Bar as the daughter of Tony Booth, when she was the one who had made all the sacrifices. My father had done bugger all to get me to this point. The powers that be raised a few eyebrows, but I was insistent. So at the moment I was admitted, the voice intoned, “Cherie Booth, daughter of Gale Booth, travel agent.”

  Derry’s pupils soon learned the meaning of the term “devil”: it meant doing your pupil master’s work for him. He would check it and sign it, and from then on it was his.

  Chris Carr, Derry’s pupil immediately before me and one of my tutors at the LSE, deviled all Derry’s commercial stuff. I did the rest. He started me out on some minor things, but once he realized that I knew my employment law, he had me write his opinions for him, then he would sign them off. With Derry, you wrote in longhand, double-spaced, leaving big margins. He would correct the text before sending it off to be typed.

  For all his faults, Derry was an extremely good teacher. When it came to an affidavit, for example, he taught me to tell the story. He was obsessive about style and about details such as not splitting infinitives. He kept telling me he thought I was probably dyslexic. The reason I hadn’t been diagnosed, he decided, was that my handwriting was so bad that nobody had noticed how atrocious my spelling was.

  Although Derry’s writing style would serve me well, he was distinctly aggressive as an advocate — hardly the ideal template for a twenty-two-year-old lady barrister. But how, as a woman, do you develop a style in a man’s world when what works for a man is regarded as inappropriate for a woman? It was difficult to find female role models. Most chambers still had a “women need not apply” attitude, and during the time I was a pupil of Derry, I never once saw a female advocate. Even after I began practicing on my own, I rarely came up against other women, except in the occasional family case. Those I did meet tended to be beginners like me.

  One of my friends at the LSE had been Veena Russell. She had originally trained as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet School, but having grown too tall, she had moved to the LSE to do law. She was extraordinarily beautiful. Her parents were South African Asians, and they still lived in Durban. They were quite well-off and had managed to buy a flat north of London, in St. John’s Wood, where Veena lived. As she had managed to get pupilage in Cardiff, the flat at Abercorn Place would be empty from September on. Her parents came over from time to time, so it couldn’t be rented out. She needed somebody to house-sit. Would I be interested?

  Overnight my life changed. Good-bye, bed-sit; hello, luxury — certainly by my standards: my own bathroom, a fridge. All I had to do, she said, was pay the bills. There was a double and a single bedroom, the former to be kept for Veena or her parents when they visited. I moved in that September.

  At one point Veena’s dad came over on business on his own. One evening he suggested that he take me out to dinner. I remember sitting on the bus with this kind, intelligent, cultured man and then realizing that everyone was giving me dirty looks. Here I was, a white girl, with a handsome, older Indian guy. I could feel the hatred blazing from the passengers’ eyes like sparks from a ray gun in a children’s comic. It was the first time I felt just an inkling of what it must be like to be discriminated against on the basis of skin color.

  To some degree, as a Catholic and a Scouser, I was used to feeling like an outsider. But my sense of apartness didn’t cause people on a bus to stare at me. In working-class London, race prejudice was still rife. It hadn’t been that long since there’d been signs in boarding- houses saying “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.” Just a month or so before I was called to the Bar, there had been riots at the Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event put on by locals of West Indian descent.

  As befitted his heavy workload, Derry’s room on the first floor was larger than most and domin
ated by a huge partners desk, at which he sat with the window behind him. My much smaller desk was facing his, and the wall between us, opposite the door, was lined with books. Behind the door was a table stacked high with briefs. Above my head was a large oil painting that Derry would stare at when he was thinking.

  Sometime in October a familiar face peered round Derry’s door. “Hi,” the newcomer said, not noticing me sitting at the desk opposite the window. “Just to say I’m here.” He was clutching an old briefcase, and his hair was looking considerably longer than before.

  “Ah, yes. Tony!” Derry said. Then he waved a hand vaguely in my direction. “Cherie Booth, Tony Blair. You see, Tony, I’ve got two of you, and I’m afraid young Cherie here beat you to it. I’m putting you upstairs.” And that’s where he stayed.

  Tony had got his pupilage by way of a personal introduction. His father had been a barrister in Newcastle before a stroke ended his career, and his older brother, Bill, was already in practice in a more commercial set of chambers in the Middle Temple, another of the four Inns of Court.

  Inevitably, as Derry’s two pupils, Tony and I spent a good deal of time together. Apart from anything else, I needed to keep an eye on my rival. It was unlikely that Derry would see both his pupils accepted as tenants. I needed to persuade him that I was the better bet. Tony and I attended numerous cases together, during which there was always a lot of hanging around, and he would regale me with stories about his recent time in France with Bruce Roe. After Bar Finals they’d gone to Paris and worked in a bar. Then, with the money they’d earned, they’d gone round the Dordogne and the Languedoc. He’d also tell me about his love life. He didn’t have a permanent girlfriend at the time, but he bragged about the upscale girls who were always asking him out. In all seriousness, I would give him advice. He knew about my London boyfriend, as did Derry, because occasionally “the worm” (as they called John) would turn up at chambers. Derry was particularly disapproving, but then he was by nature proprietorial. I didn’t dare tell them about David.