Book Review

Still a convent girl at heart

Speaking for Myself

Sometimes I just wish Anthony Clare was still with us. The late Irish psychiatrist's radio programme, In The Psychiatrist's Chair, was compulsive listening, as he used his charm, doctor's skills and persuasive manner to draw out the real person beneath the carapace of the celebrity or public figure. And what an intriguing figure Cherie Blair would have been on the show. For going by her autobiography, she is a truly peculiar mix. How can someone so intelligent, so warm, and with so much experience under her belt be so, well, plain daft, and lacking in self-awareness at times?

The bones of Cherie's story are already well known through assorted newspaper profiles, headlines and a previous unofficial biography. And it is a gripping rags to riches story of the girl from Liverpool, raised in her grandmother's house in a working-class neighbourhood, the family abandoned by her television actor father, and who by dint of brains and hard work made it to London to become a highly successful QC, mother of four and wife of the Prime Minister.

Her own account offers plenty of detail, from her convent schooldays, to her difficult relationship with her father, Tony Booth, to her early days as a lawyer, to meeting Tony Blair and their developing relationship. But sometimes there is just too much information. Why would she think that readers want to know the intimate details of her bodily functions, and where she conceived her children? At one point she refers to the details recorded in a notebook of shopping during a Brittany holiday, which suggests that throughout her life she has kept some form of diary or account of her life. And here all the information comes pouring out: when Euan was conceived (Tony's thirtieth birthday); where Kathryn came from (celebrating Tony being re-elected an MP in 1987); and how they ended up with Leo (a clinch to keep the cold at bay during a stay with the Queen at Balmoral). For some reason the passion which led to Nicholas goes unmentioned, but never mind, the reader gets full details of how dilated she was as she arrived at hospital to deliver him. She seems to have forgotten the observation she makes early on about her own squirming embarrassment when faced with her famous father's antics mentioned in the papers: "Most children find their parents' sexuality faintly disturbing." One hopes she keeps this book hidden for quite some time from little Leo.

But there are reasons for Leo to read the book. Cherie recalls her childhood in considerable detail. Growing up Catholic in working-class Liverpool in the Fifties and Sixties meant growing up in a close-knit community where what mattered most was faith and family. Cherie has to negotiate more than one world at a time. She has her immediate family but every so often up pops Tony Booth, appearing after months of absence. Eventually he becomes one of television's most familiar faces, appearing in Till Death Us Do Part as Alf Garnett's "Scouse git" son-in-law. Cherie and her sister veer between anonymous normality and sudden celebrity; and that can bring not only awkwardness but suffering, such as the time the local paper announced she had a sister, due to his relationship with another woman while still married to Cherie's long-suffering mother. And then there is school. She moves from the local Catholic primary to Seaforth, a convent school to which she wins a scholarship, and starts to shine. But being the bright kid from the poorer district can be complicated, and Cherie recalls how a teacher once spotted her in her own neighbourhood of Waterloo and assumed she must be lost rather than resident in such a place.

It is this background that perhaps helps explain the Cherie of later years: the woman who always has to achieve, to escape the confines of the world she came from, who appeared to always want to make more and more money, who grabbed the free holidays and the free gifts. And it also serves to give some insight into her determination to create a secure and happy life for herself and her family after the chaotic start she had had.

Serialisation of this book by a national newspaper focused to a great extent on stories of boyfriends, having her fourth child during her husband's premiership, and some of the more striking headline moments, such as the rows over her assistant Carole Caplin and her fraudster boyfriend, and the Iraq War and a gruesome moment when she comforts Blair after the death of Dr David Kelly - as if Blair's emotions are the point. But there is more here.

Her relationship with Catholicism is evident but to an extent unexplained. Cherie clearly moves away from it during her student days and early career, and at one point seems to be involved with three men at once (David in Liverpool, John in London, and then Tony Blair appears on the scene. Her father's daughter after all.) While all this is going on, she says that it was talking about God that brought her and Tony together. Then, it's a few years on and the Blair family has become a fixture of the local Catholic church. What brought her back? A Damascene moment? A desire to get the kids into Catholic schools? She doesn't say.

Catholic schooling leads to a row. The Blairs send their son to the London Oratory, a grant-maintained school, which outrages press adviser Alastair Campbell who demands they opt for a "bog-standard comprehensive". Meanwhile Tony is attending Mass with the family and going to Communion, as a non-Catholic. While she refers to this, she doesn't mention the row that led Cardinal Hume to ask him to desist. In fact, Hume doesn't get a mention, despite the close relationship that the Blairs developed with him, recorded elsewhere by Anthony Howard. Nor does Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor appear despite his friendliness with the Blairs; though both John Paul II and Benedict XVI appear fleetingly, with Cherie confirming here that Tony did take Communion at the Vatican before he was received into the Church.

There is also a certain modesty to her account of her faith. During her time at Number 10 she regularly hosted events to help Catholic charities and would often go out of her way to help them. None of this work involved a fee or getting recognition. I used to notice Cherie at such events, comfortable among the kind of people she grew up among and probably understood her best. For she is still a convent scholarship girl at heart, always striving to do her best, to keep her head held high. There is a vulnerability about her, which probably was shown to greatest effect in an infamous photo of her sitting on her bed at Number 10 with Carole Caplin, a kind of Svengali, Paul Burrell and Rasputin rolled into one, applying Cherie's lipstick and waving away the photographer imperiously. That photo doesn't appear in this book. Others do, recording a life which has certainly been extraordinary, but probably needs another author to disentangle it.

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