‘I’m certainly not a Little Miss Perfect’
Cherie Blair talks to Peter Stanford about her autobiography, her husband's conversion and meeting Benedict XVI
23 May 2008

Cherie Blair enjoyed an impromptu audience with Benedict XVI in 2006

When Tony Blair was admitted to the Hammersmith Hospital in west London for surgery to correct a heart flutter following the Labour Party Conference in 2004, his wife Cherie was at his side. "I stayed with him until he grew woozy, then returned to his room [while he went into the operating theatre] and went down on my knees with my rosary and didn't stop praying until the [call] came to tell me that all was well."

The passage is from her new, candid and very personal memoir, Speaking For Myself, but you probably won't have read it among the seemingly endless stream of extracts and interviews that have already appeared. These have tended to focus instead on either the more prurient aspects of the book - details of the couple's courtship as young barristers - or politically sensitive matters, such as Gordon Brown "rattling the keys" above Tony Blair's head in an effort to force him from office.

There has been one headline-making extract, however, that has touched on Cherie Blair's Catholicism - obliquely. She recounts how the couple conceived their eight-year-old son, Leo, while on their annual visit to stay at Balmoral with the Queen. The previous year a footman had unpacked Mrs Blair's "contraceptive equipment" from her spongebag. This time round she decided to save her blushes by failing to pack it. "And she calls herself a Catholic," one commentator has written, clearly not someone who has been to a Catholic church lately and witnessed the almost complete dearth of large families.

If anyone was in doubt that Cherie Blair is, as she puts it, "a good Catholic girl", she begins dutifully to recite for me the five sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, as taught by the Sacred Heart of Mary nuns at Seafield Convent Grammar in Crosby, circa 1966. We are sitting on the large beige sofa in the first-floor drawing room of the Georgian house in London's Connaught Square where the couple moved after leaving 10 Downing Street last June. There are still building works going on, and so the room feels slightly impersonal, but on the coffee table in front of us is a large and elaborate crucifix. "Is that for my benefit?" I wonder out loud. She laughs. A warm, friendly laugh. "No, it is something Tony brought back with him on his last trip to Jerusalem." There is just a hint of her Liverpudlian accent left.

One small hitherto unremarked upon "revelation" of the memoir is that Cherie, in the Catholic Church's eyes, isn't Cherie at all. For at her baptism the parish priest, despite being a cousin of her grandmother's, refused to allow the unusual name of Cherie, chosen by her actor parents after a young Welsh girl they had befriended while part of a repertory theatre. There were, he pointed out, 7,000 saints to choose from, but no Saint Cherie. "A compromise was eventually reached," she writes, "and I was baptised Theresa Cara: Theresa being a bona fide saint, and Cara being the Latin for Cherie." She maintained, she says, a bank account at her local Liverpool branch of Lloyds in the name of T C Booth until 1997.



The Connaught Square house is said, by one newspaper, to boast a life-size picture of Pope Benedict XVI with a candle in front of it. I haven't spotted it on my climb up past the family snug and the bright kitchen. Where can it be lurking? "You're welcome to have a good search for it," Cherie Blair tells me, pointing to the staircase, "but you won't find it."

She is at a loss to know where the idea comes from - but then she has got used, these past 18 years in the limelight since her husband was elected leader of the Labour Party, to reading some pretty odd things about herself. "When people meet me in the flesh," she says, "they always say two things. The first is that I look better than my pictures" - and she does, coiffed and elegant in a navy blue trouser suit that emphasises her narrow waist and covers the hips and bottom that she bemoans constantly in the memoir - "and the second is that they hadn't expected me to be like I am".

For to read the headlines this week, and indeed almost every week for at least a decade, you would think that Cherie Blair was, as she puts it herself, "a grasping, scheming embarrassment", hell-bent on "hoovering up freebies". Instead, what you get is an intelligent, unfussy, down-to-earth mother of four who takes her faith very seriously.

It is partly to try to correct the public misconception that she has ventured into print with her memoir. "If Tony hadn't become the leader of the party," she says, "this probably would just have been a memoir for my family, because I come from a family that likes telling stories. My granny was always telling me about her childhood. Blair was brought up by her paternal grandmother and mother in Crosby, after her father, the actor Tony Booth, abandoned his wife and two daughters when Cherie was three.] But this girl from Liverpool turned out to have a ringside seat at some extraordinary bits of history. Because of that so many people have written about this girl from Liverpool who don't know me at all. There was a biography of me published by a woman who never spoke to me once. She doesn't know me from Adam. So having been silent for all this time, and then having gone through the experience of moving out of Number 10, I found it cathartic to sit down and write as a way of getting a perspective on the whole journey." Which is a very different way of looking at the book from the suggestions made when the extracts first starting appearing. Some said she was settling old scores. Alaistair Campbell, Tony Blair's press spokesman during most of the Downing Street years and scourge of Cherie's long-time style adviser, Carole Caplin, is, for instance, labelled "tall and handsome... though not the kind of handsome that appealed to me". Later, he is shown, rather pathetically, insisting that Diana, Princess of Wales, fancies him.

Shouldn't a good Catholic, I suggest, have shown a little more Christian charity? "That's just my sense of humour, she insists. "Alaistair knows that. That's why we remain good friends."

Others have written that the timing of the publication was Cherie Blair's attempt to scupper Gordon Brown's premiership, an act of revenge for Brown's disloyalty to her husband. You could, of course, argue that he is doing a perfectly good job of that all by himself, but Blair insists that everything to do with the book was handled by her publishers. They advised and she followed. And, she points out, it is a personal not a political book. "I was trying to tell what it was like to live in Downing Street, as a family, during those years. Tony and Gordon's story is Tony and Gordon's to tell."

Up to a point, I'm with her. I can see why she might have needed to write it at this particular moment, capture her thoughts and memories while they were all fresh in her mind. But did she have to go ahead and publish so soon, given the continuing ill-feeling between the Brown and Blair supporters and the suggestion - again denied by her - that she and Gordon Brown don't like each other? Clarissa Eden, widow of Anthony Eden, the 1950s' Prime Minister, I point out, put her memoir in a drawer and left it there for 50 years before allowing it into print. "It didn't occur to me to do that," she admits, "because there had been so much about me already. If nothing had been written about me, that would have been fair, but because there had been so much, where frankly I don't recognise myself, I wanted to speak for myself."

It is certainly true, as she emphasises, that the "political" sections, though prominent in the extracts, are much less apparent when you read the whole book. There are whole sections - largely ignored hitherto - on her work with charities while in Downing Street. "I'm proud of what I did, but a part of me feels guilty for writing about it, as if claiming credit," she admits. There is also an often funny, sometimes poignant account of growing up in Catholic Liverpool. And she includes a spirited defence both of the couple's much criticised (not least by Alaistair Campbell) choice of a Catholic education for their children, and of faith schools in general.

"Alaistair famously 'doesn't do' religion," she writes, "so he never understood why it mattered to me that my children received a Catholic education. And it does matter. Catholic schools continue to have religious assemblies and the children observe the feast days, things that no longer happen in non-religious schools. It wasn't only important to me. It was important to Tony."

After he left office, of course, Mr Blair was received into the Catholic Church. Just before he departed 10 Downing Street he visited Pope Benedict in the Vatican. Was the Pope in on the secret? "He was," Mrs Blair confirms. "When I met His Holiness in 2006 when I was in Rome to address the Pontifical Council of Social Sciences, I really hadn't expect to see him at all. And when they asked me to come and see the Pope, I thought, 'I'm not properly dressed at all', but the Vatican officials said it wasn't a problem. [Her cream outfit was, according to protocol, only a suitable colour for the queen of a Catholic country and it went down, in the press, as another of Cherie's "gaffes". One of the things I mentioned to him when we were talking was that, by then, I knew that Tony wanted to become a Catholic."

When he finally did "come over", Tony Blair was criticised - by Ann Widdecombe among others - for his stance on abortion, namely that it was a matter for individual conscience, not something his Government should have got involved with. What does she make of her husband's voting record on the issue, I ask. For once she is stuck for an answer. "I think that..." She pauses. "I don't think I want to answer that."

Another charge laid at her door, especially in relation to the book, is that she doesn't express sufficient regret for any mistakes or misjudgments that she has made while in the public eye. She is not, you sense, someone much haunted by thoughts of what might have been or how she could have done things better. She is what she is and refuses to apologise for it. In the text, she writes: "I don't regret many things in my life, but I do regret how I treated David [her back-at-home boyfriend in Liverpool when she first met Tony Blair]."

So Speaking For Myself should not be seen, I suggest, as a kind of mea culpa? "No," she says thoughtfully rather than firmly. "I'm looking back over 53 years and I hope that there are more good things than bad things. I am no saint and I'm certainly not a Little Miss Perfect."

Speaking for Myself is published by Little Brown at £18.99