by Cherie Blair
I had taken the decision fairly early on that there was not much point in swanning round the world as some sort of glorified tourist. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do something useful. Increasingly, whenever Tony and I went away together on an official visit, it became standard for me to have my own program.
It was clearly important that I did nothing overtly political, but gradually the Foreign Office began to see how I might be useful. From its perspective, the great plus was my profession. As a barrister, I had the credentials to talk to other lawyers anywhere in the world. As our embassies would always have some sort of initiative in hand involving the law, my ability to talk to judges and senior lawyers proved useful: I could take soundings, testing the water at an informal (though informed) level. The promotion of women’s rights, for example, is not always an easy subject to address, particularly in non-Christian countries. Yet not only would this fulfill the embassy’s human rights objectives, but anything that encouraged people to use the common-law model was obviously good for our legal services, which are a large part of our “invisible” exports.
Early the following year, 1999, Tony and I paid our second visit to South Africa. We had first gone in the autumn of 1996, during his preelection tour of world leaders, and I was able during that week to visit Albie Sachs, who’d been appointed by Mandela two years earlier to lead the team writing the new South African constitution. As a human rights lawyer, I found it both a fascinating experience and a real privilege to be able to discuss the way the constitutional committee was drafting the human rights elements of the constitution. I also visited the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the brainchild of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Nelson Mandela defies all preconceptions. In person he is tall and wiry, with a shock of white hair above a calm, near-beatific face. But what struck me most forcibly was his old-world courtesy, and not only to the great and the good. The first time he came to see us in Downing Street, Euan was off school with a cold but very anxious to meet the great man. When it came to it, our son was completely overawed and managed to stammer out, “It’s so wonderful to meet you.” With this gentle voice, Mandela replied, “And it’s really nice to meet you, Euan.” And I felt that he really meant it. On another occasion Euan introduced him to a friend from the London Oratory School, James Dove, whose father was from South Africa and had been involved with the African National Congress (ANC) during the apartheid years. Again Mandela was incredibly courteous to this young man. It was clear that this was something he did all the time.
Tony’s last official visit as Prime Minister, in 2007, just before he stepped down, was to South Africa, and it was a great joy to find Mandela still alert though incredibly frail. The people around him were very protective. No one could use flash photography near him, for example; all those years spent breaking up stones in the glaring light of Robbin Island had affected his eyes. He still had the most incredible presence, but he was also still so gentle and unassuming.
During our visit in 1996, we were taken to an AIDS orphanage called Nazareth House in Cape Town, run by the same order of nuns as the orphanage just down from Seafield School in Crosby. Nuns, I have found, usually fall into two distinct categories: old battle-axes or really sweet. These were the sweet ones, and they were thrilled to see Tony. There was a little girl called Ntombi who for some reason attached herself to Tony. Then age three or four, she lifted up her arms and demanded to be carried, which he duly did. When we asked about sponsoring her, we were warned that she was HIV positive. With sad smiles, the nuns reminded us of the graveyard we had seen, filled with names and dates recording tragically short lives. Tony and I looked at each other, and the decision was made. Thus Ntombi was the first child we sponsored from Nazareth House. Over the years we developed a close relationship with her. She did really well in school and at fifteen was able to return home to live with her grandmother and other members of her family. She is still very much alive.
We have also sponsored other children from Nazareth House. All of these children have been HIV positive, but many have had other disabilities as well. One little girl who we met on our first visit, for example, had been abandoned in the road, and ants had eaten out her eyes.
Children like Ntombi no longer live in the orphanage but are looked after by foster mothers in a nearby township, in “families” of around seven children each. These foster mothers are set up and funded by the nuns, while Nazareth House is used only for the most severely disabled children.
Taking a year off before starting university, our daughter, Kathryn, went to work at Nazareth House. I had told her the story of the little blind girl, and the first time we spoke on the telephone, she told me that the girl was still there. Sadly, however, she died shortly afterward of meningitis. Her death was a big blow for the nuns; they hadn’t lost many children in recent years because of the dramatic improvements in the treatment of AIDS.
This is not the place to go into the vastly problematic question of Kosovo and its history as an ethnically Albanian province within Tito’s Yugoslavia. Though predominantly Muslim, Kosovo is considered by the Serbs to be central to Serbia’s identity as a Christian frontline state. Under Slobodan Milosˇevic´, Serbian forces had increased ethnic repression in Kosovo, but as the 1990s drew to a close, Kosovan freedom fighters (the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA) began striking back. By the end of 1998 the situation was acute. Demands that Serbia solve the problem fell on deaf ears, and the fighting intensified. Atrocities were occurring on both sides, and as a result, refugees were pouring out of the country into Macedonia, to the south. The hope was that if Serbia was threatened with NATO air strikes, it would withdraw from Kosovo. But Tony was convinced — along with the British military — that only the threat of ground troops would shift Milosˇevic´. America, however, did not relish the idea of “body bags,” and during the spring of 1999 Tony was putting all his energy into trying to persuade the Americans, via Bill Clinton, that the threat of ground troops was the only language that Milosˇevic´ understood.
Throughout that time, Tony was constantly on the phone to America. Because of the timing, these calls would often come late in the evening, when he was in the flat. If he made the call, he would do so from our living room, where the special secure line to Washington was installed. When the calls originated from America, and came late at night or in the small hours of the morning, I would answer them, as the phone was always on my side of the bed. The disruption never bothered me, as I have always been more of a night person than Tony.
Although I never heard both sides of the conversation, I was very aware that Tony was constantly saying to Bill, “This cannot go on; we must do something. If we face Milosˇevic´ down, not only will he back down, but the Russians will make him back down. But they have to understand that we really mean it.” On March 24, 1999, bombing of the Serbian capital of Belgrade began. After that, the only further threat was a land invasion, increasingly the option preferred by NATO military personnel on the ground. Four NATO countries — Britain, France, Germany, and Italy — had troops on the Macedonian border ready to intervene, but America continued to stay out. “I feel like I’m out on a limb here,” Tony used to say. “As if I’m on this big tree, at the end of a branch, and at any minute it’s going to give. They’ll saw through, and that will be me done for.” (“They” were the more cautious Clinton advisers.)
On April 24 Tony went to Chicago to deliver a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. The world, he said, is such that now we cannot just let these appalling things happen. We have to intervene, and in terms of Kosovo, success was the only exit strategy NATO was prepared to consider. “We will not have succeeded until an international force has entered Kosovo and allowed the refugees to return to their homes.”
A week later we were in Macedonia. This was the first time since Tony had taken office that British troops were poised for action. By speaking to our soldiers on the front line — part of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps led by General Mi
ke Jackson — and seeing the refugee disaster for himself, he believed that he would be in a stronger position to argue the case for American involvement on the ground.
As with all such visits, Tony’s itinerary was not broadcast in advance, and at the end of the previous week, I had spent two days in the House of Lords arguing an equal-pay case on behalf of part-time workers at Barclays Bank. Now, on Monday, we were in Skopje, the capital of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (as we had to be careful to call it, because of the sensitivity of the Greeks, who believe they have rights to the name). The capital was little more than a provincial outpost and our embassy little more than a consulate. Just talking to the staff, we realized that it had been quite difficult for Muslim and Christian staff members to work together with such terrible things going on just a few miles away.
A helicopter took us to a large refugee camp on the border with Kosovo. Everywhere we looked, there were white tents, rows of them stretching far off in the distance. The moment they realized who had arrived, the shouts rang out: “Ton-ee! Ton-ee! Ton-ee!” They already saw him as the man who was going to get them out of this horror. We moved from tent to tent with an interpreter, listening to stories of how these people had lived for years perfectly peaceably within their community, then how their neighbors — previously friends — had turned on them and threatened them with violence. We heard how they’d managed to get out, leaving everything behind. Although from the outside these tents were identical, inside they were all different. Each woman had done what she could to make her tent welcoming and comfortable for what remained of her family. It was humbling.
From there we were taken up to the crossing point, looking out across no-man’s-land to the queue of refugees waiting to cross over into Macedonia and the sanctuary of the camp. The line snaked back as far as I could see. Everyone was laden with suitcases and bundles of what were probably clothes and linens. We were then taken to the head of the line, where people just wanted to shake our hands. The interpreter went with Tony, while I talked to people who spoke English, by definition educated. I remember a lawyer and a professor at Pristina University, both of whom had previously led uneventful lives. Life under communism may not have been particularly comfortable, they said, but they had never really known hardship. Now this had happened. They had no idea what awaited them — not a job in a university, that’s for sure.
Even though I was born after World War II, when I was a child, games of Germans versus English were still commonplace, and I remember the stories my primary-school teacher Mr. Smerdon used to tell of the concentration camps. As I walked down this unending queue, faces marked by exhaustion and fear, I was deeply shocked. These people were being picked on because of their religion, because they were Muslims. What did Europe think it was doing? We had been there and done that. We didn’t need to go back.
Three months later, at the end of July, Tony returned, this time to Pristina in Kosovo itself, and this time as a true hero. His plan had worked. America had agreed to commit ground troops, and the moment it had done so, Milosˇevic´ had backed down. There are, apparently, hundreds of small boys called Tony running around the newly independent Kosovo.
Chapter 24
New Horizons
My post-1997 career at the Bar was progressing as well as could be expected given the difficulties of reconciling the Downing Street agenda with the Gray’s Inn Square agenda. That wasn’t my only problem. Shortly after we moved in, Number 10 decided to “take a view” on a case that I had been approached to do. I resisted. As a professional woman, I told them, I had to be allowed to get on with my profession. I invoked the cab-rank principle, my line being that as soon as I started making choices, I was in trouble. Even though they knew this was my position, over the next ten years the office would sometimes indicate that they would rather I did not do a particular case. I never knew exactly who it was “taking a view.” Tony would simply deliver the message. As for who was standing behind Tony, it was “the office” or “Number 10.” It was as if these anonymous people would all participate in a discussion — including my husband but excluding me — and come to “a view.” The rationale was always the same: the press would write stories along the lines of “Cherie is suing the government,” thus embarrassing the Prime Minister. My voice was never heard in these discussions. Nevertheless, the cab-rank argument was always accepted, until the next difficult case came along and we went through the whole thing again.
My fears that my career would suffer were already being justified. It wasn’t so much the money; I loved my work. Not only were my official duties taking their toll, but while a few people wanted Cherie Booth, QC, because they wanted the attendant publicity, others wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole, as publicity was the last thing they desired. It was rarely overt, but word got round.
Shortly after we moved into Downing Street, I sat as a recorder (a part-time judge), something senior barristers do to learn the ropes. The case concerned an old lady who had been evicted from her retirement home because she was being disruptive, going round complaining that the other old ladies were stupid. Before I passed judgment, she told me, “I want you to know that I have always voted Labour, and I voted for your husband in the general election.” On the basis of the evidence, I imposed a suspended possession order on her, in effect delaying the eviction provided she behaved herself in the future, at which news her attitude toward me suddenly changed. “I will never vote Labour again!”
Arguing the same point of law but from the opposite point of view happens all the time, and it certainly keeps you intellectually focused. In 1997 I did a case in which a lesbian rail worker wanted to claim free rail travel for her partner. Heterosexual partners, even if they weren’t married, were entitled to this perk, but Lisa Grant couldn’t get it for her same-sex partner and claimed sex discrimination. I argued the case for her in the European Court in Luxembourg, but we eventually lost.
Under the British legal system, judges start life as barristers, then recorders. In 1996 I was made an assistant recorder, and in July 1999 I became a full recorder. Both recorders and judges are kept up-to-date by a body called the Judicial Studies Board, and toward the end of September I went on one of the three-yearly update courses. On the night of the twenty-third, a couple of old barrister friends and I went out for a birthday supper: my forty-fifth. I was feeling very positive. That summer we had had a good break in Italy, and Tony was feeling relaxed. All the energy he had expended over Kosovo had been worth it. Sitting there, raising a glass of champagne, I saw only one little shadow on my immediate horizon: my period. Where was it?
“It’s a bit odd,” I told Tony when he rang me that night from Chequers. “I’m usually so regular.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “Probably just my age. Don’t worry.”
He wasn’t about to. He was working on his Labour Party Conference speech and was paying little attention to anything else. But there was a little niggle at the back of my mind.
A few weeks before, we had been on the usual prime ministerial weekend at Balmoral. The first year we had actually stayed overnight, in 1998, I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked for me: not only my clothes but also the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag, with its range of unmentionables. This year I had been a little more circumspect and had not packed my contraceptive equipment, out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another . . .
But then I thought, I can’t be. I’m too old. It must be the menopause.
Once back from the course, I met up with Carole at the gym. “I know it sounds odd,” I said, “but do you think you could get me a pregnancy testing kit?” It was hardly something I could pop into the local chemist for. She brought it round on Thursday, and on Friday morning, lo and behold. I just couldn’t believe it.
I rang Tony immediately. “The test,” I said.
“It’s come up positive.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means I think I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, my God.”
That evening he came back from Chequers, and as soon as there was an opportunity, I showed him the little dipper and explained the significance of the blue line.
“How reliable is it?” he asked. I said I didn’t know, but Carole had got me another one, though I’d have to wait to do that the following morning.
“We’ll have to tell Alastair.”
Alastair and Fiona came up the next morning before we set off for Bournemouth and the conference. The second test had shown the same little blue line.
“So how pregnant are you exactly?” Alastair asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are we talking weeks or months?”
“Weeks.”
He seemed more amused than anything else. They took the view that given it was still very early days, the best thing was to keep quiet. By chance I had already agreed to return to London on Monday for a Breast Cancer Care event. I’d leave a little earlier than planned to see my GP.
As arranged, Fiona and I took the train back to London on Monday. Rather than risk making a big deal of it, I went along to the general surgery at the Westminster Health Centre. It turned out that my usual doctor, Susan Rankin, wasn’t there, so I saw another partner.
“So, Mrs. Blair,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“I think I’m pregnant,” I replied with a smile. The poor man fell to pieces.
I had to calm him down. He didn’t want to do an internal examination, he said. Feeling obliged to have at least a bit of a prod of my tummy, he kept saying, “Susan should be doing this.”
“What about one of your tests?” I suggested. “Presumably it would be reliable?”
Relief flooded over him.
“Well?” Fiona said when I went out.