by Cherie Blair
I remembered a conversation Tony and I had had barely a month before, when we’d taken a rare weekend away from the kids. He’d been asked to speak at the European Business School in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. It had been years since we’d been to the French capital, and we did all those things you do in Paris, including going to the movies, something we never had time for in London. We went to see Schindler’s List, a haunting film that left us feeling disjointed and somehow suspended in time. While we were having dinner afterward, Tony started talking about John Smith and how frustrated he felt under his leadership. He felt that the modernizers were grinding to a halt.
“It can’t go on like this,” he said. “But I’ve got this feeling that it won’t anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that something’s going to happen. Got to happen.”
“Like what?”
“Some kind of bust-up. I don’t know. But something. It can’t go on like this.”
Never could he have imagined anything so tragic or so decisive.
Tony called about two minutes after I got into chambers.
“You’ve got to stand,” I told him.
“It’s difficult.”
“Listen to me. You have to go for this.”
He was about to board the plane. I said I’d meet him at arrivals. We’d pick up the car and talk about it then.
As I turned into High Holborn on my way to the tube, I bumped into our friend and former Hackney neighbor Barry Cox.
“Can’t stop,” I said. “I’m off to Heathrow to get Tony. When you talk to him, Barry, tell him that he’s got to stand. I’m frightened he’ll think that maybe he owes it to Gordon not to.”
When I got to Heathrow, I called Anji from a pay phone. Mo Mowlam had rung, and the influential Scottish MP John Reid, both saying the same thing: “He’s got to go for it.”
As usual the arrivals hall was crowded, but it wasn’t till I saw Tony come through on his own that I realized that many of those waiting were cameramen and reporters. They practically trampled me underfoot to get to him, shouting “Tony! Tony!” For a moment it was mayhem, then he gave them a few words on the theme of “It’s a great shock,” and of course it was. They may not have agreed on everything, but John had been good to him, and Tony respected and liked him. Eventually I managed to get him down to the parking garage and into the car.
I am a barrister, an advocate, and my job is putting a case coherently. This time it seemed that all my skills had abandoned me. I just said, “You’re the best candidate for the job, and you can’t let Gordon seize the moment through some misplaced sense of obligation.”
“He’ll have all the Scottish MPs tied up.”
“No, he won’t. John Reid’s been on the phone already. Listen, Tony. This is your moment. You’ve got to take it. Who dares, wins.”
He sat slumped in the passenger seat with his eyes closed and said, “I know.” But it was with no sense of triumph or eager anticipation. It was more resignation.
We both knew the arguments against: the children and Gordon. Tony looked pale. That he let me drive was a sign of how unnerved he was. “John Smith was working too hard,” he said, “burning the candle at both ends.”
I knew that time was of the essence. My fear was that Gordon would just move in and it would be a fait accompli, but I knew Tony was the right person for the job. By the next general election, there would be people voting who had never known a time when the Tories weren’t in power. The new leader had to be someone they could relate to. Tony had always been more appealing to the general public than Gordon, and more grounded in the realities of everyday life. What could be more grounding than bringing up a young family? Ironically, Tony was always saying, “Gordon, if you really want to be leader, you need to get married.” Yet he also felt it was a mark of how honorable Gordon was that he didn’t marry just for appearances. (In my view, however, if he had, he would inevitably have been a more rounded person, with another dimension to his life.)
Nothing would happen until after the funeral, so to that extent discussions would be ongoing. But we all had to know whether Tony was going to stand. When we got to the office, people were beginning to show their faces. Anji was there, and Mo and Peter Kilfoyle: the two of them would eventually head up his campaign. Also, to my great relief, I saw John Reid, one of Neil Kinnock’s close advisers and an early advocate of party reform. Although he and Gordon were both Scottish MPs, I knew he would support Tony. The voices were unanimous: Tony had to stand. And I think he knew in his heart that he was the better person to carry the modernizers’ message, if only because he embodied it better. It was about changing the perception of the Labour Party, making it a party of government and actually being relevant to people’s lives. Having made my position clear and knowing that I would see him later, I headed back to chambers.
The next day the BBC had Tony as the front-runner. Over the next few days I had plenty of time to think things over. I knew this was a pivotal moment for Tony. I knew that he had what it takes. I knew it would make a huge difference to Tony himself. I knew that he would have less time for the children, but I didn’t think it would make much difference to us as a family. My practice was going in the right direction, we had just bought a big family house, and I assumed we would tick on.
My own belief is that he decided to go for it straightaway. For him the real question was not whether he should stand, but how to reconcile Gordon in order to preserve the modernizers’ ticket. What he most feared was that if both of them stood, the modernizers would lose out through squabbling among themselves. Tony’s main aim over those next few days was to persuade Gordon to give way to him. He wouldn’t stand unopposed — the left would see to that — which was even more reason not to risk splitting the moderate vote.
Getting Gordon to stand aside was no easy task. First, he was the more senior. Second, he obviously had his supporters, too. One of the key players was Peter Mandelson. I remember sitting in our kitchen that first night and asking Tony, “What about Peter? What does he think?” Tony said with a sigh, “Peter is very conflicted.” I wish now that Peter’s ambivalence had been better known at the time, because Gordon’s conviction that Peter was instantly in our camp destroyed their relationship.
John Smith’s funeral was on May 20 in Scotland. Gordon had gone back to his constituency fairly early on, while Tony just flew up for the funeral. The fact that Gordon hadn’t been in London during the early stages was irrelevant to his campaign. We knew from day one that Nick Brown would be his campaign manager and had a good idea of the tricks he would have up his sleeve. Nick is an old-style political campaigner, and his people were basically going around saying, “Gordon is more acceptable to the unions. He is more true Labour than Tony. Tony is a young upstart.” He didn’t need Gordon in London to do that. In fact, it was more effective if Gordon wasn’t there.
After the funeral Tony stayed with Nick Ryden, a friend from Fettes, and that night Gordon went round there to talk. Nick had only recently bought the house, and not everything worked as it should. At one point Gordon disappeared upstairs. He was gone for what seemed like a very long time, and Tony was just wondering what on earth could have happened when the phone rang. It was Gordon calling from the bathroom on his cell phone. The handle had come off the door, and he couldn’t get out.
As the week went on, Tony clearly had the momentum, and I was coming to the view that if Gordon wanted to stand, Tony should let him.
“You’ll win anyway,” I said. “So don’t come to a deal. Just let him lose.” But Tony said no. The modernizers were a team, and this was a team effort. He didn’t want anything to break that up.
Back in London there was yet another get-together with Gordon. This time it was at Lyndsey’s house in Richmond Avenue, just round the corner. (One of the conditions of these meetings was that no one should see Gordon coming to our house.) This was the meeting where essentially it was agreed that Tony would stand unopposed and
Gordon would be Chancellor; that they would work together and Gordon would support him, and the aim would be to reform the Labour Party and take power. Part of Gordon obviously didn’t want to accept that, but another part of him could see that Tony now had the momentum. There were plenty of ways he could have rationalized it to himself: that he had been unlucky in having the economic portfolio, which had failed to give him much exposure, whereas Tony, with law and order, had been able to strike a popular chord. It was always a given that they would work in tandem and that when Tony stood down, Gordon would take over. Tony also made it clear to Gordon that he had no intention of staying leader forever and that when he did stand down, he would support Gordon as his natural successor, assuming they worked well together as Prime Minister and Chancellor in the meantime.
As far as I know, the timing of all this was never discussed, but when Tony left for Lyndsey’s, I made my position perfectly clear, even if I framed it as a joke. “If you agree with Gordon that you’re going to do this for one term only, don’t come back home. Because that’s just ridiculous.”
But Tony was always very supportive of Gordon having his chance. He used to say that in terms of ability, Gordon was way ahead of everyone, and the irony is that if they’d only worked as closely together as originally agreed, his chance would have come sooner.
Barry Cox raised about £70,000 from various people to support the campaign, and Anji was organizing the campaign events.
Tony never takes anything for granted, but it was soon clear that he was the front-runner. I didn’t by any means go to all his meetings, because he was traveling round and I had the children to look after and a career to pursue. I did go to some meetings in London and the southeast, and I went to a couple of the question-and-answer sessions, where he was developing the relaxed style of campaigning that would soon become popular not just with Labour Party members but with the whole British electorate: sitting down on the edge of the stage and rolling up his shirtsleeves to his elbows. He did fantastically. I was so proud of him.
So much was going on, and I was so focused on the job at hand — which was getting Tony to stand and then getting everyone to support him — that perhaps it’s not surprising that I forgot about my own role. The “Hang on a minute, if all this is going to happen, I’m going to be a bit in the public eye” moment was late in arriving. One evening, shortly after Tony had decided to stand, the phone rang.
“Hi there, Cherie. Great to hear your voice after so long. So how are you doing?”
It was Carole Caplin.
Chapter 15
Nearly There
When Carole called, I couldn’t have been more delighted. The twin spindles of my life — politics and the Bar — were rather incestuous, but Carole was completely separate. More to the point, I was still anxious to lose the extra fourteen pounds.
She came round to the house the following Saturday.
“Well, this is all very exciting, isn’t it?” she said, as she came in. Her call hadn’t been entirely serendipitous. She’d just returned from New York and knew all about what was happening. She wondered if I needed some advice on hair and makeup. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I went to the same hairdresser I’d been going to for years, and as for makeup I just went to Boots, our low-priced pharmacy chain. It would be useful, she said, if we could look through my wardrobe; it would help her determine my style. I didn’t really have a style. My clothes divided into two types: casual things to hang round the house in, such as leggings, baggy tops, tennis shoes, and the occasional long skirt; and barrister suits, mainly black or blue, always with skirts, as trousers were not allowed. My work shoes had heels, but they were reasonably chunky, as I spent a lot of time on my feet, both in court and traveling. I also had the odd fashionable dress, which I bought from someone called Ivona Ivons, who ran a shop near one of the courts. She would sort me out a couple of suits for work, perhaps a dress at the same time, and that was that.
I wasn’t uninterested in clothes, but I didn’t read fashion magazines or keep up with the latest styles. I’d just pop along to Ivona, and whatever was in that year I’d have. I was reasonably objective about my body. My strong points were my hair, which I had in abundance, and my skin. I had always had a neat bust and a small waist, but I had big hips and thighs, so on the whole I avoided trousers, as I thought my bottom was too big. Although I tried to look nice, we had three small children and two houses to keep up, so shopping for me was bottom of the list. The exception was work clothes. Operating in such a public arena, I needed to look sharp. Shoes were not a priority. It wasn’t as if Tony and I went out to restaurants or clubs. Our social life consisted of seeing friends and just sitting around a kitchen table, talking. As most of our friends also had young kids, it was hardly a competitive environment.
I didn’t have either the time or the knowledge even to think about changing my image. Looking at my wardrobe through Carole’s eyes, however, I could sense what was coming. “I think you could do with some help,” she said. Of course she was right. Everything was connected, she said: my weight, my clothes, my food. It would take time, but she was convinced that I could begin to see some improvements quickly, certainly in the couple of months we had before the results of the leadership election were announced. We started immediately. She spent the rest of the afternoon at the house.
The first thing that needed attention was what I ate, which soon extended to everyone in the family, as she chucked out half the things in the kitchen. She opened the cupboards and went through everything, saying, “This is bad; this is good.” (It was short-lived. The kids would have none of it. Within days the cupboards were restored to their former glory.)
Once that was done, we went upstairs to the sitting room to go over an exercise plan. There was no time to lose. Since I had done her workshops five years previously, I already had the basics, but this was specific. While we were doing this, she met Tony and suggested an exercise plan for him as well.
My wardrobe came in for the same treatment as the kitchen cupboards, and most of what I had went straight into garbage bags. She made me put on some things before making a decision. Long jackets were more flattering, she said. I should go for low necks rather than high necks. Heels were good, and I should wear more of them. On the one hand, it was a fairly horrifying spectacle; on the other hand, it was probably for the best. By nature I’m a hoarder, and this was something that needed to be done. “If you can’t remember when you last wore it, chuck it” was one of her mantras.
To sharpen my eye, Carole took me shopping. Browns, on upscale South Molton Street in London, was a revelation. It was the first time I had been anywhere so obviously fashionable. But she was right about making an immediate improvement. I wore the dress I bought at Browns to a party midway through the leadership campaign and bumped into Fiona Millar, the daughter of Audrey Millar, at whose house I had attended meetings of the Marylebone Labour Party years earlier. She was feeling particularly frumpy, she said, as she’d only recently had a baby girl with her partner, a political journalist named Alastair Campbell, who would later play a large role in Tony’s life. “But as for you, Cherie, you’re looking great. Much more — how shall I put it? — groomed!” How we laughed.
The question of the deputy was still in the air. John Prescott and Margaret Beckett were standing both for the leadership and for deputy leader. The aim was to find the best balance. Tony’s membership of the T & G was not treated with any great seriousness, and he was not seen as a union man. He’d got them to accept that the closed-shop agreement would not be reinstated, and he wouldn’t be remembered fondly for that. On the other side, he had pushed through a minimum-wage policy. Peter Kilfoyle (MP for Liverpool Walton), Anji, and I were keen on John Prescott — very much a union man — who we felt would make for more of a contrast. Gordon was keen on Margaret Beckett. But it would depend entirely on who won the ballot.
July 21, when the results of the leadership election were to be announced, wa
s a lovely summer day, and come what may, I knew it was important that I look my best. I also had discovered how much more confident I felt when I looked the part.
Downstairs at Richmond Crescent, the combined Blair and Booth clans were gathering. While I was getting ready upstairs, the kids gave me a running commentary about the scruffy-looking types hanging round on the pavement opposite, men mostly, loaded down with cameras and camera bags.
About half an hour before we were due to leave, Tony had a word with them and agreed to do some pictures. He suggested the park behind the house where he and the kids often played soccer. So the photographers got us to sit on a bench while they snapped away: Tony and me looking at each other, Tony looking at the camera and me looking at Tony, and so on. It was the first time I had ever done anything like it. The nearest I’d got to experiencing any kind of press interest was at Pat Phoenix’s funeral, when I’d led my father into the church.
The oddest thing of all was being called Mrs. Blair, as they shouted out instructions. Most people called me Cherie. My colleagues at the Bar certainly did, as did those involved with the Labour Party, where I was very much a person in my own right. Even at the children’s school, where mothers might be expected to be called Mrs. Whoever, I was known by my Christian name, as both teachers and the head knew me primarily as a school governor. On a day-to-day level the only people who didn’t call me Cherie were the clerks. To them I was Miss Booth.
Tony’s union, the T & G, had provided a car to take us down to the Westminster Institute of Education, where the results would be announced. The candidates all lined up on the stage, and when I saw Tony’s face, I knew he was victorious. He had come top, in fact, in all sections, including the union one, which our people had speculated might prove more difficult. John Prescott was duly elected deputy leader, so it couldn’t have been better. Then it was time to celebrate. Cars took us the short distance to Church House, a conference center just behind Westminster Abbey. It was a beautiful afternoon, and both the building and the square outside were thronged with supporters. We were taken straight upstairs and out onto the balcony, where Neil and Glenys Kinnock were already waiting.