by Cherie Blair
My friend Felicity always says, “You can see why Tony wanted Cherie, but we’re not quite sure why Cherie agreed to take Tony!” Perhaps she thought that he needed a working-class girl to give him working-class credibility. But she couldn’t understand why I needed a charming public-school boy when my principles were so clearly to the left.
Politics and religion certainly played a part. John wasn’t interested in politics, although he would have described himself as left of center. David, while far from left of center, was a Catholic and would have been the safest choice: going back to my hometown and doing okay, but never really being able to spread my wings. Tony might not have been Catholic, but religion was more important to him than to anyone I had ever met outside the priesthood. In terms of politics, we might not always have agreed on the details, but we were never that far apart.
Over the years I have thought about what made me choose Tony. It was partly chemistry — I fancied him rotten and still do — but partly because I thought even then that he had something. Behind the charm there was a steely quality to him. Frankly, he fascinated me, as I had never met anybody quite like him before, somebody who could give me a run for my money. Life with the others would have been easier but not so challenging.
Foolish girl — to think how simple my life could have been . . .
There turned out to be a curious symmetry between Tony’s family history and mine. His paternal grandparents were actors — music-hall performers — who met on tour in the north of England. In 1923, in Yorkshire, a son was born: Tony’s dad. A week or so later they arrived in Scotland and decided — no doubt for all the right reasons, just like my parents — that the life of a traveling player was no life for a baby, particularly one born out of wedlock. So the child was fostered out to a Glaswegian electrician and his wife, James and Mary Blair. The little boy’s parentage was acknowledged in his new name: Leo Charles Lynton Blair: Charles for his father (born Charles Parsons) and Lynton for his father’s stage name, Jimmy Lynton — which strikes me as a bit hard on his mother, who got precious little thanks for her contribution. (For the record, her name was Mary Wilson, née Bridson, stage name Celia Ridgeway.) Although Leo’s birth parents eventually married and desperately wanted their only son back, Mary Blair refused to relinquish her much-loved adopted child. If you’re looking for a parallel there, think no further than my grandmother, similarly distraught when she had to hand over me.
Another thing Tony and I have in common is ambition. We are both driven. It has been suggested that Tony needed to accomplish what his father couldn’t because of his stroke. I certainly felt the need to make it up to my mum and grandma for their disappointments. My mum’s father, Grandad Jack, had extraordinary ability, but he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. As for my dad, for all his success, charm, wit, and innate intelligence, he didn’t do his mother proud. Not that she wasn’t proud of him. On the contrary, she was immensely proud of him. And with reason: he was a very talented actor. Sadly, though, he never reached his full potential. Perhaps his charm was his undoing. Tony is charming like my dad, but he has the steel my dad lacks.
Did I see in Tony the man my dad might have been? No. I see that in myself.
My mum never got to Canada; the romance fizzled out. In November 1977 she moved down to Oxford. The travel bureau of the Oxford branch of the department store chain Selfridges was in some kind of trouble, and the head office asked her to sort it out and then take over the management. When I was at the LSE, she had been brought in to troubleshoot at Selfridges in London, and they had offered her Oxford then, but she’d turned it down. Lyndsey was still at school; Mum had left a daughter once and wasn’t about to do it again. Only now, with both of us having left home and Lyndsey set to come to London for her final two years of practical legal studies, known as Articles, did she feel she could think of herself. It would be a promotion, and with the increase in salary, she would be able to buy a small house. As she said to me at the time, “Well, I either stay in Liverpool for the rest of my life, or I take this one chance to move nearer you and make a better life for myself.” Lyndsey had made it clear that she wasn’t planning on staying in the north either, so it made sense for Mum to move south.
In the spring of 1978, her finals over, Lyndsey came down to London. I was able to help get her an articled clerkship. It didn’t pay much, but thanks to Veena’s flat, she could stay in Abercorn Place for nothing.
Once my mum was in Oxford, getting to see her was much easier. Realizing it would take time for her to get to know people and build up her own circle of friends, Tony and I used to go up most weekends. She had bought a little terraced house with two bedrooms, so it was perfect. It seems strange now, but the first friends my mum made in Oxford were Geoff and Beverley Gallop, and we would always meet up with them. They were living in a small flat in north Oxford, and we became like a little family. Geoff was doing his Ph.D. Beverley had been a teacher in Australia and later became a very successful potter. As Gale was only twenty years older than me, the age difference was never an issue. In spite of the David complication, my mum and Tony got on right from the start. In a way, from his point of view, she became a substitute mother. To her, Tony was still a boy.
I was finally beginning to realize how hard it must have been for Mum, living all those years under her mother-in-law’s roof. She never really was able to make a life for herself. There was a relative of Grandma’s, a chauffeur whose employers lived in the northwest, and sometimes he would take us out in his car for long weekends. I remember a trip to Scotland when I was about nine and my sister was seven. Something was obviously going on between him and my mum. He was a nice man, but Lyndsey and I were not terrifically encouraging, to put it mildly. Mum never complained, however, and it was only much later that I realized what a brake we had been on her love life.
Whenever Veena’s parents came to London, Lyndsey would move out and stay with Tony’s friend and fellow tenant in 2 Crown Office Row Charlie Falconer in the house he’d recently bought in Wandsworth, across the river in south London. When he’d gone to view it, one of the things Charlie had liked was the little garden. “This will be lovely for breakfast in the morning,” he’d said to the woman showing him round. He remembers that she looked at him strangely, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, his house was just under the railway arches, directly beneath the main flight path to Heathrow, and bang next to the underpass/roundabout/ dual carriageway. You could never go out there.
Tony moved in with Charlie, and as a result, I got to know the house — and their domestic habits — quite well. When it came to basic housework, they were a disgrace. Slobs, the pair of them. Whenever I arrived for a visit, I’d find my feet sticking to the kitchen floor because it was so dirty. So the first thing I’d do was get down on my hands and knees and scrub. Then I’d spend the rest of my time — as did Lyndsey when she was there — straightening up, changing the sheets, and cleaning the bathroom.
That summer Geoff, Bev, Tony, and I went on holiday to Brittany. Unlike me, Tony hated to fly, and since Bev was newly pregnant, we went on the ferry. This venture required a car, and Tony had this idea that he would like a Morris Minor. He managed to find one through an ad in a local newspaper. After only two weeks, it collapsed — completely packed up. Tony was absolutely furious; it was clear he’d been sold a dud. So Tony went back to the chap he’d bought it from and threatened him with legal action if he didn’t give Tony his money back. He was about to get into fisticuffs when he had the presence of mind to say, “I’m a barrister,” and the chap paid up. Luckily one of my colleagues in Essex Court was selling his old Beetle, so Tony bought that instead.
As my mum had never learned to drive, we’d always gone on package holidays to resorts. This freewheeling was a totally new experience, and I loved it. (Only when it came to reading the map did the jovial atmosphere deteriorate.) Tony was quite used to this pile-everything-into-the-car kind of holiday. His mother had come from Ballyshannon,
in County Donegal in the Irish Republic, so when he was a boy, they went every summer to his mother’s family’s place. When the Troubles began, they switched to France.
All in all, we had a great time. That holiday consolidated a friendship with the Gallops that would continue on down the years, with Tony and I becoming Tom’s (Bev’s bump) surrogate godparents. (Geoff and Bev were not religious so their children weren’t actually christened.)
During that trip we just followed the French coast. Bev’s pregnancy wasn’t proving easy, and my overriding memory is of inspecting the toilets at the various places where we stayed to ensure they were fit enough for her to be sick in. I also had my first experience of oysters.
We marveled at the standing stones at Carnac — rows and rows of them, more than three thousand in all — and the swimming, from little coves to great, sweeping Atlantic beaches of yellow sand (not so different from Crosby, bar the temperature). At Nantes we turned the Beetle inland and headed down the Loire Valley.
Tony and I were now definitely an item. When he introduced me as his girlfriend, I no longer made a face. In spite of my fears that Derry would take umbrage, in the end he was fine about it.
The following September we drove to Italy. Tom Gallop had been born, so this time it was just Tony and me. Love and marriage were definitely in the air. Marc and Bina Palley had tied the knot, with Tony as best man. Everyone said his speech was the best that summer.
Like many other young barristers, we both worked in August. With everyone else away, it was a good time to pick up new cases and clients. Then we were off to Calais, making our way down through France and Switzerland to Italy, to Chianti country, where we had rented the bottom half of a villa. The pale blue Beetle had survived the year, but only just. I can remember us trying to get up St. Bernard’s Pass, where it felt as if we were pedaling, and just about making it to the top. In those days the Michelin Guide had a category called “Good Food at Reasonable Prices,” marked on the map with a red R, and we planned our route following the red Rs religiously.
Until he met me, Tony’s girlfriends had all picked at their food. To go out with a woman who enjoyed her food was a real eye-opener for him.
“It’s probably a class thing,” he said.
What did he expect? I mean, here was I, a working-class girl, and we’d paid money for this food, so I was jolly well going to eat it. The idea of picking at a few leaves in a ladylike fashion verged on the criminal to me.
Derry, too, liked to see a girl enjoy herself, and when he was feeling expansive, he would take us out to incredibly fancy places, like La Gavroche. He also introduced us to El Vino’s, the celebrated drinking haunt of barristers and journalists on Fleet Street. It was incredibly expensive, so the only time I ever drank there was when Derry bought us drinks.
Enjoying eating is only a step away from enjoying cooking, and renting a villa meant that I could buy food at the local market and cook it at home. Although I enjoyed cooking in London, in the seventies it was difficult to get even garlic, let alone the eggplants and peppers piled up in Siena. The pages of the notebook I kept that summer have as many descriptions of meals as they have of churches and architecture.
The two weeks ended all too soon. The last morning I was up early, scrubbing the floors and cleaning so as to leave the villa as I would hope to find it. Naturally Tony was nowhere to be seen. My last task, inevitably, was the toilet.
So there I was, on my knees, cleaning the toilet, when Tony came up behind me and said, “You know, Cherie, I think maybe we should get married.” Without hesitation, I said yes.
Chapter 9
Marriage
Since early that summer I had no longer been living in Veena’s flat. Her parents needed it back. Having lived in luxury for two years rent-free, I could hardly complain.
The Bar is the ultimate nonlinear networking web, with each set of chambers acting as its own mini-hub. Whatever the requirement, chambers is always the best place to start looking, and so it proved in this case. A former pupil, I was told, had just bought a house and was looking for someone to help pay the mortgage.
I already knew Maggie Rae in a professional capacity. Following her pupilage, she had gone off and become a barrister in one of the first chambers set up outside the Inns of Court. Once there she decided that the Bar wasn’t for her and retrained as a solicitor. Now qualified, she was a partner in the left-leaning firm of Hodge, Jones and Allan, who regularly sent family law work to our chambers.
The house Maggie had bought was in Wilton Way, Hackney — one street north of London Fields, the only patch of green in the area. I had never been that far east before, and West Hampstead and St. John’s Wood were like posh Mayfair in comparison. The area hadn’t always been so run-down, as could be seen from the houses themselves, many of which were Georgian. The streets were both wide and wide apart, making for generous gardens. Hackney’s proximity to the City (London’s financial center), however, had resulted in its being heavily bombed in the Second World War, and where the bomb sites had been filled in at all, it had been with poor-quality housing and tower blocks.
Maggie’s house was a complete wreck — in fact, the whole front wall was missing. It had previously been divided into bed-sits, and the only heating was a gas cooker on the top floor (my bedroom) in what had been a little kitchenette. So there we’d be, up in my bedroom, the front wall covered with a tarpaulin and the door of the oven wide-open, with us huddled round it for warmth.
She was heavily into do-it-yourself, and I spent every free moment there with the sandpaper — from floors to doors to skirting boards. Tony got involved as little as possible; he has many fine qualities, but DIY is not among them. Maggie had even constructed her own bed, admittedly from a kit, and persuaded me to do the same. This time I did enlist Tony’s help. He would, after all, benefit personally. The result was totally hopeless. Not only was the bed wonky, but it tended to collapse at just the wrong moment. Building that bed had one single advantage: we learned very early on that DIY wasn’t for us, and when it came time to look for a house of our own, wrecks were out.
During the long drive back from Siena, my head was full of plans for the future. Tony’s proposal might have been a little unusual — definitely the wrong one on her knees — but I hadn’t needed to think about my answer. We were best friends and lovers, surely the ultimate combination for a happy and successful marriage. There was a constantly changing dynamic between us, and I knew that life with Tony would never be boring. What more could a girl ask for?
Possibly a ring. But then I have always hated my fingers, and Tony felt we should put everything we had into a house. There was just one thing he wanted to be sure of, he said, as we drove the Beetle off the ferry at Dover.
“What’s that, my darling?” I asked, giving his knee a squeeze. Could he want me to tell him how much I loved him yet again?
“Promise me you won’t say anything to anyone.”
I remember sitting there and thinking, What? Instead I said, “I see.”
“Nothing to worry about. I just think we need to be sensible about how we handle it, that’s all.”
As in, just in case I change my mind? My little balloon of happiness instantly deflated.
He did agree that we could tell my mother, and the first weekend we were back, we drove up to Oxford to see her. Even then, my husband-to-be pulled his punches, talking at some length around us buying a house. My mum, being very liberal-minded, thought he was saying, “Cherie and I are going to move in together.” Only later, when Tony suggested buying a bottle of champagne, did the penny drop.
“You mean you’re getting married?” she said. Up till then the mword hadn’t crossed his lips.
What mainly worried Tony was Derry. If he disapproved, it could have really negative consequences, he said. As far as I was concerned, it was not a question of “if.” Of course Derry would disapprove. He may have tolerated Tony and me as sweethearts, but marriage was another thing altogether. He’d
always had a droit du seigneur attitude toward me, though naturally he didn’t put it like that.
“You’re much too young to get married,” Derry said, to no one’s surprise, when Tony eventually told him. “Don’t do it.”
Paradoxically it was Derry who made it possible, at least from a financial perspective. He brought Tony into a case to do with the Bank of Oman. For the next few months, Tony was always popping back and forth to the Persian Gulf. It was a nice earner, and it brought him his first really big fee, so we were able to start looking for a house.
My personal worry was closer to home. How would my mother react to my father giving me away? Unlike being called to the Bar, there were no precedents for the bride’s mother walking her up the aisle.
One morning early in November, I was at home, vaguely listening to the radio, getting ready to leave for chambers, when I heard my father’s name.
“Tony Booth, the Till Death Us Do Part actor, is in hospital after being severely burnt in a fire at his home. The other occupants of the building were unharmed.”
My first thought was to call Susie, though I hadn’t seen her or my father in months. She was very angry. He’d been taken to Mount Vernon Hospital, she said. Beyond that all I got was “drunk . . . locked him out . . . tried to burn the place down . . . may he rot in hell.”
I then called Mount Vernon. I should try to come in as soon as possible was all they would say.
I went on my own. I had nothing on that morning, and Lyndsey had to go to work. In any event, her feelings toward the man who had betrayed her were still not good.
There are no subways in Hackney, so I took a bus to Liverpool Street, and from there it was direct but slow. Eventually I had to transfer to another bus. The journey took more than two hours.
My father tells a complicated story of what actually happened the previous night. It involves the Special Air Service (SAS), counterespionage, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and a botched assassination attempt. Two SAS operatives, he claims (whom he met in a pub, naturally), helped him break into his own house by climbing on two paraffin drums to access a trapdoor to the loft. They then decided it would be easier to set fire to the front door, so they put a torch to the paraffin, which subsequently exploded, and flames engulfed him. I’ve never bought that version of events, and, strange to relate, the two key witnesses have never materialized. Some facts are indisputable, however. He was certainly locked out of the flat; he was certainly burnt; and he was certainly very, very drunk.