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Cherie Blair and her tell-all memoirs

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Indiscretion?: Cherie Blair’s accounts have left even her admirers shaking their heads.

During the ten years she spent in Downing Street, Cherie Blair was seldom away from headlines. And while her husband has, more or less, faded from the front pages since his fall from power last summer, she continues to be in the news.

The past week has been all about Cherie Blair and her embarrassingly vacuous memoirs Speaking for Myself which have left even her admirers shaking their heads, if not choking over their breakfast. There is nobody who is anybody in the media who has not (adversely) commented on it, and some of the harshest criticism has come from women commentators who believe she has diminished herself by revealing intimate details of her personal life, including a girlie account of her affairs before she finally found Tony Blair.

What they have found particularly distasteful is her lengthy description of the circumstances (written with titillating glee) which led to the birth of her youngest child Leo while the Blairs were spending a bitterly cold winter weekend at Blamoral Castle, as the Queen’s guests. Critics say it confirms her “reputation” for lacking discretion.

“If you read all the vulgar details….you realise that she is not merely indiscreet; she simply does not do discretion,” wrote Minette Marrin, The Sunday Times’ right-wing columnist.

But the book hasn’t gone done well with the Left either. The Observer writer Catherine Bennett was withering. The Cherie Blair that emerges from the book, according to her, is every bit as “scheming”, “greedy” and “vain” as she has been routinely portrayed in the media. Indeed her self-portrait is so damaging to her own image that if anyone else had penned it they could be sued for libel, though in this case, Ms Bennett suggested: “Couldn’t she sue herself for libel?”

Another female columnist, Jenny McCartney of The Sunday Telegraph, complained of a surfeit of unnecessary and embarrassing “personal details” in the book such as how she started dating “Tony” after meeting him atop a double-decker bus while still having affairs with two other men. (This bit got The Times so excited that the newspaper sent a reporter to find out if London buses were still a good place for “romance” only to discover that, alas, they are not, what with intrusive CCTV cameras and overcrowding. Besides, there are not too many double-decker buses anyway.)

There have also been mutterings of disapproval in the Labour Party over the timing of Ms Blair’s book which is seen as an attempt to portray her husband as a victim of Gordon Brown’s leadership ambitions. Her criticism of Mr. Brown at a time when he is struggling for political survival has angered the Brown camp and it is being suggested that the publication of the book was deliberately brought forward (it was originally scheduled for release in the autumn) to embarrass Mr. Brown and cash in on his difficulties.

An unnamed friend of the Blairs is reported as saying that the book would have been even more savaging about Mr. Brown but Mr. Blair forced his wife to tone it down for fear of damaging “Gordon and the government.”

“Yes, Tony was very nervous about Cherie’s book and the effect it could have on Gordon and the government. There are lots of little details she knows which are not there,” the “friend” told The Sunday Telegraph.

Ms Blair, who is one of Britain’s most respected human rights lawyers and is a QC, has upset some in her own fraternity with what one judge described as her bid to “make money by outrageous comments.” Judge Gerald Butler, QC, called for her to resign accusing her of bringing her profession into “disrepute.”

Much of the reaction to the book has been prompted by Ms Blair’s poor relations with the media. There is a history of Cherie-bashing making her perhaps the most reviled wife of a British prime minister in recent times. And the feeling, as they say, is mutual with Ms Blair never missing an opportunity to show her contempt for journalists. Leaving Downing Street for the last time, her parting shot to the waiting photographers was: “Bye, I won’t miss you.” And, as she writes in her memoirs, an angry Mr. Blair said through “clenched teeth”: “You can’t resist it. Can you? God’s sake, you’re supposed to be dignified [on such an occasion], you’re supposed to be gracious.”

That parting shot was her revenge on the media for years of harassment she suffered at their hands but, at another level, it was also so characteristic of her. For, as she acknowledged in an interview: “I had never been taught the meaning of the phrase ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.” Indeed, few journalists would have believed her had she told them she was going to miss them.

It all goes back to the morning after she moved into No. 10 in May 1997 when she was photographed collecting milk bottles from the front door still in her night dress, bleary-eyed and her hair a mess. That photograph, splashed across the front pages, set the tone for how the media was to treat her subsequently.

Notwithstanding Ms Blair’s own contribution to her problems with the media, a lot of the coverage has been grossly unfair, malicious and in bad taste. There has also been a whiff of class snobbery in the way she has been ridiculed, for instance, for her dress sense and her alleged obsession with money.

In the end, however, she paid for her independence and refusal to conform to the conventional idea of a prime minister’s spouse, though why independent women loathe her so much remains a mystery.

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