by Cherie Blair
The G7/G8 is unusual among summits in that the wives (or husbands) are an intrinsic part of the event, and a separate, parallel program is organized by the host wife. As the G7 the following year would be ours to host, Tony and I were making the most of this opportunity to see how it worked. Tony had his team, and I had Fiona, although she hated flying and hated even more leaving her daughter Grace, who was still a toddler. My hairdresser, André, was also with me, though Alastair had made it clear that his presence was to be kept strictly under wraps. He hadn’t even been allowed to come on the same flight. We were lucky he made the trip, however; it was André who vetoed the cowgirl outfit, complete with tasseled boots and cowboy hat, that greeted me on arrival.
“You are not wearing that, Cherie,” he said as soon as he saw it. And he was right. It was basically a Halloween costume with what André described as a tablecloth for a skirt. Tony’s outfit was equally over-the-top, but he decided that the shirt was bearable, so he wore that with a pair of his own jeans. Unfortunately mine was an all-or-nothing situation, and to go out representing my country looking like Doris Day cracking her whip on the Deadwood stage just wasn’t appropriate. The Denver stage would have to make do with smart casual.
In spite of Alastair’s warnings that André should maintain a low profile, somebody saw him. Alastair’s response was that Mrs. Blair was paying for her hairdresser herself, as indeed I was. Then the story became spendthrift Cherie, chucking money away like nobody’s business. It was a steep learning curve: whatever I did, it seemed, I couldn’t win. It was the twentieth-century equivalent of the stocks: anything could be thrown at me with impunity.
The spouses’ program started on day two. I set off with the other wives (there were no husbands at this time) on one of those trains that you often see in Westerns, complete with viewing platform at the back. As we chugged up into the Rockies to gaze at the magnificent scenery, I was struck by how Hillary worked the crowds lined up along the embankments. Suddenly, something caught my eye, and at the same time Hillary said, “I think we should go back in now.” As we all trooped back inside, I mouthed, “Did you see what I saw?” She laughed and nodded. A man had “mooned” the passing train, but apparently none of the other ladies had noticed.
A line-dancing exhibition put on by a local pensioners’ group awaited us at our destination, and once again I saw how Hillary took the initiative, introducing us with an off-the-cuff speech. Even then I realized I was watching a master at work.
What I would have done without André I do not know. Although for a visit of this length, the Prime Minister always travels with an entourage of policy advisers, press officers, duty clerks, garden girls, ’tecs, and comms (communications) people, they were there to help him conduct his business. Their sole contribution to the domestic side of things was a note saying what time the luggage had to be ready for collection. In this regard, that last morning in Denver, André found me in a state of panic and began to help, folding Tony’s shirts, collecting the little piles of things he would take out of his pockets at night, and sorting out his suits, while I scrabbled round trying to retrieve odd shoes and socks from under the bed.
Next stop was Washington, where Tony and Bill were having bilateral talks. When I unpacked, I realized there was nothing he could wear; it all needed to be professionally pressed or re-ironed. This time André wasn’t there to help: Alastair had forbidden him to travel on the same plane, and he’d had to fly via Chicago. In the end the furor over André was so intense that Alastair banned him from coming on the next overseas trip. I would have to make do with local hairdressers like everybody else, he said.
Hillary asked if I’d be interested in seeing how she did things. By this time she had been First Lady for five years, so she and her staff had a huge amount of experience. Although there were obviously big differences between Downing Street and the White House, I thought I could learn from the way she handled the workload.
Her office was situated in the East Wing, where an entire department was devoted to invitations and menus. Being invited to the White House, she explained, was seen as an honor: invitations became like family heirlooms, lasting long after the dinner was forgotten. This hive of activity was known as the calligraphy department. Everything was printed from copper plates, and envelopes were addressed by hand in the most beautiful italic script.
“But it must be so labor-intensive,” I said, looking round at the mass of heads bent over their work. She explained that most of them were volunteers, old and young, who worked in the White House for the love of it. Some of them stayed for years, serving each president faithfully, like the person I met whose job it was to answer the mail addressed to Socks, the Clintons’ cat. Others were interns, young college graduates who spent around six months working in the White House solely for the experience. This system (pre–Monica Lewinsky) seemed an entirely good idea, and on my return to Downing Street, I put forward a proposal to the Cabinet office about the possibility of using interns as a way of coping with the rising tide of correspondence and associated work that we were struggling to deal with. This proposal was adopted, and interns were brought into a number of departments, though after a few years it became apparent that it wasn’t really saving the government that much money. Although the interns weren’t being paid, we had to have people to supervise them and plan everything. The program was stopped in 1999.
My tour round the First Lady’s office was incredibly useful. Hillary showed me the White House gifts they would take with them when traveling. These were not the gifts that would be exchanged on official visits, but smaller things, such as White House key rings, given to people who had generally been helpful. None of these gifts was very costly, just a token that was much appreciated. She also told me that she was planning a series of lectures in the White House, which would start in 1998, to commemorate the millennium. I later did the same.
Her final piece of advice would resonate the longest. “You’ve got to recognize,” she said, “that you’re not going to please everyone the whole time, and you’re certainly not going to please the press, and therefore you should just do what feels right to you. And so long as you feel it’s right for you, then don’t get too upset about what other people say.”
At the end of July 1997, after 150 years, Hong Kong was being handed back to China. It was both a political and a royal occasion, and it involved a mass exodus of senior personnel from Britain, including the Prince of Wales. As a result, there was a problem of transport. The Queen had the royal yacht Britannia, and she also had an aircraft. As the plane was nearing the end of its life, there had been talk of getting a new one, to be shared with the Prime Minister. This was eventually shelved for PR reasons, and from then on planes had to be chartered from British Airways (BA). In this case, however, Prince Charles would be returning on the royal yacht, which was already moored in Hong Kong, so it was decided that the Prime Minister would use the royal plane. The Prince would travel out with Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, on a chartered BA plane. (This was the occasion when Prince Charles famously was obliged to travel business class, as Cook, his wife, and Foreign Office officials had commandeered the first-class cabin. In a highly amusing, if ill-advised, epistle to friends, the Prince later complained about how small and cramped he’d found it.)
The royal plane was old and slow. The good news was that the front cabin could be transformed into a bedroom with two beds. The bad news was that it took nearly twice as long to get to Hong Kong as it normally did, as we had to refuel in Vladivostok. When we got out to stretch our legs, we were instructed not to move beyond a small area round the plane — not that we would have wanted to, it being ringed by Russian soldiers toting machine guns and looking distinctly menacing.
As always in these circumstances, as we came in to land in Hong Kong, there was a queue for the bathroom. By now I knew that the red carpet and a slew of photographers would be waiting, and I needed to look the part. Carole had worked out all my outfits, including the ar
rival one, which had been brought on board in a suit carrier. Suddenly, it was “Cabin crew, seats for landing,” and I was still in the bathroom making myself look respectable. There was nothing to do but just get on with it, I decided. At the moment of touchdown, I was standing on one leg, my bum hard up against the folding door and my other leg on the toilet seat, desperately trying to pull on my tights before emerging in the official outfit for the walk down the steps.
On the way back from that trip, Alastair said, “We can’t do that again.” André’s presence, he belatedly realized, had certain advantages. By the time the plane landed, I would be appropriately dressed and immaculately coiffed, no matter how long the flight or befuddled my head. No hair dryers were allowed on board, but André became a deft hand with gas-heated curling tongs.
As the handover ceremony began, just before midnight, the heavens opened, and I watched in admiration as Prince Charles began reading out a message from the Queen, which, thanks to the tropical downpour, was disintegrating in his hands. He was standing directly in front of me, his white tropical suit becoming increasingly diaphanous, which afforded me an interesting perspective on the future monarch. At midnight the flag of the People’s Republic of China and the regional flag of Hong Kong were raised simultaneously to the unfamiliar strains of the Chinese national anthem, and as the People’s Liberation Army goose-stepped their way into the hall, I felt a shiver run up my spine.
Chapter 22
Journeys
Princess Diana had been determined not to lose touch with Tony. Shortly after we moved into Number 10, Maggie Rae let us know that the Princess was keen to see him again, and she wanted to bring William and Harry to Chequers. Alex Allan, Tony’s principal private secretary, nearly had apoplexy when he found out.
It would be quite wrong, he said, for Tony to see Diana before he’d officially seen Prince Charles. So sometime in those few weeks, Tony did in fact see the Prince, and Diana and William duly turned up at Chequers one Sunday in early July.
Over lunch she talked again about wanting to play a more prominent role in public life. She was determined that William be given a normal, modern upbringing, to make him, as she put it, “fit to be king.”
Again she was very relaxed, this time chatting with my mum and being lovely with Kathryn. She talked about how she would like to have more children and how she longed for a little girl. We sat there on the grass, with Kathryn tucked between Diana’s knees, watching the three boys and Tony play soccer on the north lawn. Later, when she and Tony went for a walk, William came with us to the swimming pool, where my lot all had a great time showing off. William was really sweet to Kathryn. She was totally in awe, not because he was a prince, but because he was a handsome fifteen-year-old, and she was only nine.
The afternoon was deemed a success, relaxed and normal, and in the Blair household Princess Diana was regarded as a good thing.
That summer we went to Tuscany for our vacation, staying at a friend’s house, and had the usual jolly, relaxing time. Nothing had really changed, we told ourselves, as Ros’s swimming gala got under way. Yes, we had to pose for the press at the beginning of the trip — for which it agreed to leave us in peace for the rest of the time — and yes, the garden girls were somewhere in the village and the ’tecs were somewhere in the shadows, but we could forget about them. Or at least try to.
Arriving back in England at the end of August, we went straight to Myrobella. The following weekend was the annual Prime Minister’s visit to Balmoral, so we had a few days to relax. The Prime Minister is never really on vacation, however. The Mail on Sunday was threatening to publish the name of a British spy in some far-flung part of the world, and Tony became convinced that if his name was revealed, the guy would be killed.
That Saturday night we went to bed in the hope that Alastair had managed to sort it out, but at around three in the morning the phone rang. I have a vague memory of it ringing somewhere out of reach, then I drifted back into a deep sleep. The next thing I heard was the intercom buzzing outside our bedroom. As Tony rushed to the landing, I thought, Oh, God. The Mail has done it. It’s printed the spy’s name, and he’s been killed.
A minute later he was back, as white as a sheet. It was the police, he said. There had been an accident. “It’s Diana.” The bell on our bedside phone hadn’t been working, which was why we hadn’t heard it. He picked up the receiver and called the duty clerk in Downing Street.
I watched him as he listened, saying nothing.
“A car crash in Paris,” he said eventually. “She’s in a coma. They don’t think she’ll pull through.”
It was awful. I saw her sitting there on the grass, hugging her knees, only a few weeks back, and thought how full of life she’d been, talking about wanting to have more kids.
Finally the call nobody wanted. All I heard was Tony repeating, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” We were to say nothing to anyone. It would be announced to the press shortly.
He was shocked and genuinely upset. During what remained of the night, Tony was on the phone, watching television, or doing both. There were so many things to think about. There was the issue of the photographers, but he didn’t want to make a knee-jerk response. He didn’t know whether he should speak to the Queen or to Prince Charles.
When the kids woke up, we told them what had happened. They were so upset, because they felt they knew her, and they liked her.
Tony agreed with Alastair that he should make a statement before morning service. Alastair was usually anti anything that involved the church or God, but on this occasion even he agreed it might be appropriate. Diana’s death had sent a shudder through the nation, and Tony needed to say something to express what people were feeling.
St. John Fisher, the Catholic church in Sedgefield, was deemed inappropriate for his statement, as there was nowhere for the press to stand. So we went to St. Mary Magdalene in Trimdon, where Lily Burton, John’s wife, played the organ. By the time we arrived, the television cameras were in position. Tony delivered his statement and, it’s fair to say, caught the mood of the nation with his observation “She was the people’s princess.”
We returned to London that night and got Terry to drive us past Buckingham Palace to see the flowers that were already piling up round the base of the gates. Back in Downing Street, we opened a book of condolences, which everyone signed.
Now, of course, the film The Queen has somehow become the official record of that extraordinary week, but it wasn’t quite like that. For example, from a pedantic perspective, the way that Number 10 is portrayed in the film is completely wrong, not to mention the way Tony and I are portrayed. (I never swear, and Tony is a good deal taller than Michael Sheen, the actor who plays him.) But there are more serious points to be made.
For a start, I never felt there was any opposition from Buckingham Palace to what Tony was suggesting; in fact he had been asked to become involved in the arrangements, for both the return of the princess’s body and the funeral. The royal family’s main concern over those first few days was to protect the boys, because they were so young and so upset and the family really didn’t want them exposed to anything more. They weren’t thinking beyond that. They just wanted to pull together as a family and didn’t see why they should share their grief with the rest of the world. And in a sense, why should they have? I think they hoped that they could just get on with it — accept what had happened, do what had to be done.
I think that’s what Tony really wanted, too, but as the days went by, it became apparent that this wouldn’t be enough.
When we had first arrived at Number 10, we were told of detailed plans that existed in the event of the death of the Queen Mother. The protocol people had it all set out, exactly what was to happen and when. Tony and I even had to take suitable black outfits with us on holiday every year in case she died. And now, with the death of Princess Diana, they were treating this as a similar event. Their main concern was that the plan should be carried out
with all due deference to precedent and protocol, including the business about how Diana wasn’t Her Royal Highness — even in death, that had to be observed. When the body was flown back to England, the question arose of who was going to meet it. Tony suggested that he do so, and the Queen agreed. But then Prince Charles decided that he wanted to go, although the protocol people clearly would rather he didn’t.
The last remaining question was the flag. Protocol decreed that it should be flown at half-mast only when the sovereign dies. Princess Diana was not the sovereign, QED.
The business of who should be invited to the funeral was another protocol issue, yet it seemed important to Tony that Diana’s charities be given priority over foreign dignitaries, and even members of the government, who had had no involvement with her. I don’t believe the family themselves had much to do with this scrabbling and squabbling. They were really too upset to do anything except hold themselves and the children together. Of course Tony did talk to the Queen, but she’s a reserved sort of person, and from my understanding, it was less her personally than the system that was creating the difficulties.
Throughout it all, Tony believed that as Prime Minister, his priority was to make sure that all this didn’t damage the monarchy, that the royal family got through unscathed, and he succeeded.
For obvious reasons, the traditional Balmoral weekend didn’t happen that year. Instead we were invited for lunch. It was very low-key, just the Queen and Prince Philip and some old family friends, with the conversation revolving around agriculture, stag hunting, and fishing. Sitting there, I thought, This is really weird. Yesterday, at the lunch in Number 10 following the funeral, there I was sitting next to Hillary Clinton and Queen Noor of Jordan, talking about current affairs, and here I am today with our head of state talking about the price of sheep.