Speaking for Myself

by Cherie Blair

  Just before lunch André called me from the salon. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not great, André.”

  “You know I’m not her greatest fan, but I think you need to see Carole.”

  “She’s banned.”

  “That’s my idea. You meet at my flat!”

  “But when?”

  “This afternoon. I have it all worked out. You turn the Christmas lights on with the kids, and I’ll be waiting out back.”

  “You mean just walk out?”

  “I mean just walk out. Don’t tell anybody. Be very naughty. Give them the slip!”

  “But I’ve got the Loomba Trust reception.”

  “I’ll get you back for that. Promise.”

  So that’s what happened. Between three and four-thirty I was down in Number 10 for the children’s Christmas party. Once the tree ceremony was over, I walked back in through the Downing Street front door, turned left, and pushed the button for the Number 11 lift. I didn’t normally bother to take the lift up one flight of stairs, and this was no exception: I didn’t go up; I went down, down into the basement, through the comms office, and out into the back parking lot, where André was waiting. Nobody stopped me; nobody even seemed to notice. His flat is in Berwick Street, in Soho. Carole was already there, he said. He’d be waiting in the café across the road. But we didn’t have much time. “Half an hour tops,” he warned me. It was a few minutes after five.

  She was in a bad way. Very upset, very contrite, very tearful, not least because she had lost the baby. I told her that I wouldn’t abandon her, that as far as I was concerned, she had done no wrong. Did it do any good? I don’t know. But we both had a cry, and I think we both felt better. She showed me the contract that Ian Monk had negotiated with the Mail on Sunday for her to contribute a weekly column. She pointed out the bit that said, “Any reference to Mrs Cherie Blair shall appear only after prior approval.” She would never talk about us, she said. Then I had to go. Any idea that I wouldn’t be found out was ridiculous, of course. I had been seen leaving on the security cameras, but at least they hadn’t had time to follow us and didn’t know where I was going. It felt like a victory.

  When we got back, André gave me a hug. Then I opened the car door and walked in the way I’d left. I nodded to the uniformed officer on duty. He nodded back and picked up the phone. The prisoner had returned.

  The next day it got worse. The Tories were calling for an official inquiry. I couldn’t stand it anymore; I was just shaking. Alastair had had more questions through from the Daily Mail, implying that I had been trying to exert pressure on a judge. The law was my life! How could anybody think I could do such a thing? Yet Alastair was asking me as if it were a real possibility. I felt so angry that when they said they wanted me to make a statement, I agreed. They wrote it.

  Eventually I added in some stuff about Carole. Alastair wasn’t happy, but I didn’t care. It was supposed to be my statement, after all. That evening I was due to present the Partners in Excellence awards, which as patron I did every year, to organizations involved with affordable child care and associated services. The venue was the Atrium restaurant, just beyond the House of Commons. Fiona suggested that we use it as a platform.

  As I got into the car, Fiona sat grim-faced beside me. From the moment we passed the barriers into Whitehall, it began: flashlights against the windows of the car, the shouts of the photographers. Never before or since have I felt so hounded. I was their prey. It was that simple. Past the House of Commons, on to the Embankment, then finally we were there. The nice new ’tec opened the door, and an arm from somewhere guided me in, the lights blinding me, the voices shouting. Once inside, I stood there trembling, checking to see if the microphone was turned on. My statement had been timed at nine minutes. Just another nine minutes, and it would all be over. And these good people thought they were getting a speech on children and excellence. I thought, They are the ones I should be apologizing to. All their hard work, and they get this charade. A nod from Fiona, and I’m on.

  “In view of all the controversy around me at the moment, I hope you don’t mind me using this event to say a few words. . . . You can’t fail to know that there have been a lot of allegations about me and I haven’t said anything, but when I got back to Downing Street today and discovered that some of the press are effectively suggesting that I tried to influence a judge, I knew that the time had come for me to say something. It is not fair to Tony or the government that the entire focus of political debate at the moment is about me.”

  Tony was at his weekly audience with the Queen, but he saw it later on the news. There was a moment toward the end when I nearly broke down, when I mentioned Euan having left home. What we’d wanted for him in Bristol, most of all, was that he would be safe, that he would be away from the press. He’d had all that furor over going to school, then there had been the drinking episode, and he’d gone to Bristol to get away from all that. And now here he was, tangentially at least, caught up in this. I’d dragged my son, whom I’d wanted to protect, into the news. My girlfriend, who had just lost a much-wanted baby, was being hounded by the press. And on top of all that, I had to try to keep going with all my official engagements and keep relatively calm at home so that the other children didn’t get too upset. All of that I could cope with, but the mention of Euan’s name was the thing that tipped me over.

  One day, a few months before the 1997 election, Philip Gould had told me that Tony was going on a long journey, and that neither his past friends nor the office could go all the way with him. The only one who could do that was me, and I needed to make sure I was by his side supporting him. I took those words to heart and vowed always to be there for him. So the worst aspect for me of the whole Bristol flats nightmare was that I had let Tony down. At the moment in his life when he needed me most, I was a drag on his energies rather than a source of support.

  Yet however bad things were, I never felt that he had abandoned me. For a quarter of a century, we had been not only lovers but best friends. I always knew there would be things that Tony couldn’t talk about, but I also knew that he would never lie to me, which was why I was 100 percent behind him over Iraq and the threat Saddam Hussein represented to world order. His preoccupation with what he had to do and the consequences for individual lives, both British troops and Iraqi civilians, weighed on him night and day, awake and asleep. In trying to get the UN Security Council to force Saddam to comply with its resolutions, he faced a titanic struggle. He was tireless in his efforts to persuade the Americans not to act unilaterally, while at the same time attempting to galvanize the rest of the world into action when it was clear that the language of diplomacy was no longer enough. Although 2002 had undoubtedly been a bad year for me, whatever problems I had faded into insignificance compared to what he had on his plate.

  Following that splendid tenet of tabloid journalism “no smoke without fire,” “Cheriegate,” as it was wittily dubbed, dragged on for weeks, until eventually the press just got bored. The only positive thing to emerge were the letters I received in commiseration: the charities I was involved with, colleagues at the Bar and on the Bench, politicians from both sides of the House, priests and vicars, monks and nuns, friends and people I had never met and never would. I even got a kind letter from Prince Charles. I replied to them all, but those people will never know just how much their support meant to me.

  Eventually Peter Foster was deported. (One of his more spectacular claims, worth including for its sheer audacity, was that Tony was the father of Carole’s baby.) He is now in prison in Australia, serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud. A few months after he was deported, he was in touch with the Mail again, sending it copies of fabricated e-mails purporting to show that I had tried to channel funds through an offshore tax haven. He clearly had no idea of how little money we had. The Mail, naturally, demanded yet more answers. This time, thanks to my accountant’s thorough forensic investigation of my entire computer system, Downing Street
was able categorically to deny the whole thing. The Mail decided not to run the story.

  The reverberations continued to rumble round Downing Street. There were more cross-examinations by Hilary Coffman. There was a belief that Carole had taken clothes either for me or herself without paying for them. I was required to contact everyone who had ever supplied me with clothes and get written assurance that the discounts I’d been given were standard, that there had been no special favors. That turned out not to be sufficient. The new Cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, told me that I had to repay the discounts. I refused. I wanted to know on what authority he was able to interfere with personal contracts I had made. “You show me the law that says that I have to pay this back, and I will do it. Otherwise I will not.” Eventually a private secretary was assigned to investigate the whole business of the clothes. She told me that she would try to work out a better scheme, where the rules would be clearly set out.

  I had done my homework. From ambassadors’ wives to the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, nobody else carried the burden of having to dress well for official duties without financial help and under such constant media scrutiny. As for other leaders’ wives, they expressed total disbelief that I didn’t have a budget for formal occasions. A report was apparently written and presented, but in spite of several requests, I never got a glimpse of it.

  While all this nonsense was going on, the situation in Iraq was becoming increasingly tense, involving Tony not only in telephone calls round the clock but also in an endless series of bilateral talks, some of which I had to attend.

  On October 11 we had flown to Moscow for Tony to see Vladimir Putin. We had first met the Putins in February 2000. Putin was then the heir apparent, and this was a getting-to-know-you trip to St. Petersburg, his hometown and power base. After a whistle-stop tour of the Hermitage, we were taken to War and Peace, a four-hour opera by Prokofiev. Refreshments during the two intervals had consisted solely of champagne and caviar. As I was then six months pregnant with Leo the trip wasn’t easy, and although the hotel was like an oven, outside it was bitterly cold.

  My next visit couldn’t have been more different. It was the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. In the short time since assuming the presidency, Putin had poured money into St. Petersburg and totally transformed it, or so it appeared. Much of it, we later discovered, was no more substantial than a film set: the facades of some of the houses had been painted and others disguised to make them look totally restored. It was the end of May, and the weather was lovely. (A few years later they actually sent up airplanes to disperse the clouds so that the sun could shine for the G8.)

  The idea was to show St. Petersburg in all its former magnificence, and in that Putin certainly succeeded. The most extraordinary of the reconstructions I saw was the amber room in Catherine Palace. The original had dated from the early eighteenth century — a room completely lined with amber and semiprecious stones — but it had been looted by the Germans during World War II, and no trace of the contents has ever been found. In terms of the entertainment, expense was no object — ballet, fireworks, vodka and caviar wherever you looked. Rather surprisingly, I found I liked caviar. When our host saw me spooning some up, he hastened over. “You don’t want this stuff,” he said, removing my plate and bringing me some beluga.

  It was a mind-boggling display of Russian power. Once again I was grateful and amazed to have been granted a ringside seat to history, to incredible people and incredible events.

  Three weeks later the Putins arrived on their first state visit to Britain, and I was down to entertain Lyudmila one afternoon. As we had been taken to War and Peace in St. Petersburg, I arranged to visit the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where we would be joined by an array of cultural people for lunch. On the Putins’ arrival in London, however, I was informed through an aide that Mrs. Putina would really like to go shopping. From what I knew of her, I judged that Burberry’s might hit the spot, so I arranged a discreet visit to their showroom just off Piccadilly Circus immediately after the lunch. Unfortunately this being a state visit, transport had been provided by Buckingham Palace, and Lyudmila arrived at Downing Street in the royal Bentley, glass everywhere, designed to provide an unrestricted view of the occupants. Discreet it was not.

  The aide had been right, however; the opera wasn’t her thing. But she perked up immediately when we got to Burberry’s. No sooner had we arrived in the showroom than she stripped off down to her underwear. In the interests of diplomacy, I decided I had better keep her company. As she didn’t have any money on her, I put her considerable purchases on my credit card. The next day I was informed that a large packet had arrived from Mrs. Putina. She was repaying me in cash. I had never seen so many £50 notes. Our friendship was undoubtedly consolidated that afternoon in our knickers.

  In those early days Lyudmila Putina was very unsure of herself. Her husband had fairly chauvinistic views about the role of a wife. He had two basic rules, she confided: “A woman must do everything at home” and “Never praise a woman; it will only spoil her.” Language was important to her; she had studied modern languages at Leningrad University’s philology department and spoke fluent German, the Putins having lived in Germany for several years.

  After the Berlin Wall came down, she told me, she had feared for the future of Russian literature and language. In 2002 she had visited the United States to take part in the second annual National Book Festival hosted by Laura Bush, and she decided to replicate the idea. I promised that I would support her, and I did, going over with Laura for the launch and on two further occasions, when I met the First Lady of Armenia, Bella Kocharian, and the First Lady of Bulgaria, Zorka Purvanova. Without my support, Lyudmila later admitted, she probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. There’s no doubt that her book festival gave a huge boost to her confidence and, I think, her status. As a thank-you she gave us lunch in the state rooms of the Kremlin and an extraordinary private tour. By “us” I mean my “entourage”: to wit, André and Sue Geddes. (To his credit, our ambassador, who was also invited, did not balk at this unusual arrangement.) We were taken high up onto the roof by the famous golden domes, from which we could look down at the cathedral. Having been razed by Communist apparatchiks because they didn’t want to look out on it, the cathedral had been restored by Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s after its ignominious decades as a public swimming pool.

  The aim of Tony’s current meeting with Putin was to persuade him that the UN needed to demonstrate unity so that America did not feel it would have to act unilaterally. It was a chance, Tony said, to show that in the new world order, the UN did have power and could make things happen. We met at Putin’s private dacha. That evening, I remember, he was at pains to point out that far from being a convinced communist, he had always been a man of religious faith with a strong attachment to the Orthodox Church. I was not entirely convinced. I sensed that the former KGB chief was still there under the surface. (He has a very powerful presence — he’s broad-shouldered and keeps himself fit with judo. He puts a lot of value on physical strength, his own and Russia’s. This is not a man you would want to cross.)

  The invitation to his private cottage was a sign of favor, and that night, apart from the interpreter, there were just the four of us. The dacha was, in fact, a hunting lodge, and Lyudmila had never even been there before, their main dacha being outside St. Petersburg. The meal was heavy in the traditional Russian manner: meat and no vegetables, unless you count pickles. When it was over, Putin stood up and stretched. “And now,” he said, “I want to take you wild boar hunting.”

  By this time it was about half-past ten. No one had said anything about hunting wild boars or anything else. I was dressed for dinner in high heels and a dress, and the temperature outside was well below freezing. Tony came to help me on with my coat. “Buckle down, girl,” he said, “and stop complaining.”

  Lyudmila gave me a look: this wasn’t her idea of fun either. Outside it was pitch-dark, and
there was nothing I could do to prevent my heels from click-clacking on the concrete path while everyone else was creeping along with exaggerated stealth. I was petrified. The machine-gun-toting Russian bodyguards were behind us, while our own protection officers were presumably somewhere behind them — at least I hoped so, in case we were about to be ceremonially assassinated. I didn’t know whether to be more frightened of the guns or the wild boars, which I’d seen pictures of and which I knew to be particularly vicious creatures.

  Putin led us down to a hide and was explaining the finer points of boar hunting as he peered down the sights of a night-vision rifle. One day, I thought, I will tell my grandchildren about this. No doubt to their disappointment (but not mine), there would be no violent denouement to the evening. Not one wild boar was seen, let alone killed.

  Russian hospitality is not for the fainthearted. The next day we were told we were going on a picnic. Again the temperature was subzero, but the area was very beautiful, with a huge lake and waterbirds everywhere; everything glistened with hoarfrost. A wild boar was being roasted over a roaring fire, next to which, in a kind of bower, a table had been laid, complete with white tablecloth and silver cutlery. Seeing that I was shivering, Putin ordered one of his soldiers to give me his greatcoat, which was not very different from the ones in Dr. Zhivago. I was faced with one further practical problem. In order to cut the meat, I had to take off my gloves, but if I took off my gloves, the cutlery stuck to my hands. The wild boar was delicious, but the cold was so overwhelming that I can’t say I really enjoyed it.