Speaking for Myself (13 page)

My experiences over those months deeply affected me. My kids know that when I die, I want to be buried. Whatever happens, I do not want to be cremated. Not only that, but my relationship with my dad changed. And he changed.

Dad’s accident also affected his relationship with Lyndsey. Her reaction was “Trust my dad always to go for the main chance.” Maybe. But he was very ill, and it’s only thanks to the wonderful nursing care he received at Mount Vernon that he’s alive today.

My father’s accident had one unforeseen advantage: no way could he come to the wedding. So it was arranged that my uncle Bill, Audrey’s husband, whom I’d known since I first arrived at Ferndale Road when he was just her boyfriend, would give me away.

As Tony and I were both members of Lincoln’s Inn, we could easily have had the wedding at Lincoln’s Inn chapel. But it was expensive to hire, and as my mum was now living in Oxford, it made sense to have the wedding there. We were incredibly lucky that St. John’s College gave us permission to marry in its chapel, where Tony had been confirmed (in itself highly unusual). This was achieved through the intervention of a friend who had done his postgraduate thesis on the history of the chapel and persuaded the chaplain to conduct the service.

The chaplain was named Anthony Phillips. We discussed the issue of my being a Catholic. The Church of England didn’t have a problem; the question was whether I did. In fact, since leaving home five years earlier, I had been to Mass only when I was in Liverpool. At the LSE no one even knew that I was a Catholic. I probably should have asked my father’s second cousin Father John Thompson to be there alongside the Reverend Phillips, but I didn’t want to push my luck. Anthony Phillips was doing us a big favor. I didn’t want to say, “Oh, and by the way, I’d rather you didn’t officiate at the wedding.”

There was no stag night or anything like that. The two families had arranged to have a meal together the night before the wedding and were meeting up at my mum’s house. By six o’clock the bridegroom had still not turned up. He eventually arrived around eight, and we had a jolly evening. But next morning, calamity: he’d forgotten to bring any underpants, so he had to scrounge a pair from the hotel. They were hideous, ill-fitting things, with the most peculiar line round his crotch area, clearly visible in the wedding pictures.

Grandma was there, of course, and her face lit up when she saw Tony. “I’m so glad she’s marrying you,” she said. “I like you.” That was a relief.

I had bought my dress on sale at Liberty, the famous store in London’s West End. It was very pale ivory silk chiffon with pale lilac binding. It had a medieval feel, the sleeves being split along the top and caught by little pearls. The bodice was satin, hand-painted and sewn with seed pearls. To go with it I had a skullcap with the same pale lilac binding as the dress and more pearls. As for the bridesmaids’ dresses, Maggie had volunteered her services as seamstress, as she had a sewing machine. We bought matching silk from Liberty, which she made to her own design. Unfortunately, like a lot of Maggie’s DIY activities, it took longer than she anticipated, and we had barely finished hemming the dresses when the car arrived to pick us up for the wedding.

The bridesmaids — Lyndsey; Tony’s sister, Sarah; and Auntie Audrey’s daughter, Catherine — went first with my mum. As the car was my mother’s contribution, I’d decided we needed only one — it could come back and collect me and Uncle Bill. That was a good idea in principle, but Oxford on a Saturday afternoon is a nightmare, and my mum had miscalculated how long the trip would take. We waited and waited. The wedding was supposed to start at two o’clock, but at two the car had only just arrived back to get us.

“Tony will be so cross,” I twittered as we crawled through traffic. “He’ll probably just go.” I was convinced there would be no one waiting at the altar and a lot of strained faces. Tony hates it when I’m late, and I often am. For once, though, it wasn’t my fault. We eventually arrived at the chapel at two-thirty, by which time the poor trainee organist had been through his entire repertoire and had gone back to the beginning.

The bridegroom hadn’t left. I learned later that he’d had his last cigarette at five to two. I had never smoked, but I’d watched my grandfather dying as a result of smoking, and I wasn’t interested in seeing Tony go the same way. It had been my one condition for us getting married.

At around three o’clock on March 29, 1980, Tony Blair and Cherie Booth were pronounced man and wife. Needless to say, I did not promise to obey. Otherwise it all passed in a blur. All I can remember is that Anthony Phillips preached a really good sermon, about how in marriage you have to keep moving, never stick, never be static; you have to move forward together. When he came to the bit about “those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” he bound our wrists together with his stole, which I wasn’t expecting and had never seen done before.

“Gosh,” Maggie said later, “he really meant that, didn’t he!”

The chapel was quite small. Apart from our families, most of the guests were from our chambers. The master of St. John’s had offered us the use of his house for the reception, so we could walk there from the chapel, which we did, as the mad March wind blew everyone’s hat off.

Tony’s brother, Bill, was best man. His ushers were Charlie Falconer, Chris Catto (a friend from Fettes), Geoff Gallop, and Bruce Roe. (Marc and Bina Palley were in Dubai.) In the absence of my father, I had asked Derry to make the speech on my behalf. This was a mistake: it was all about Tony. How marvelous he was and how lucky I was to have him. Naturally he cast himself in the role of Cupid. Afterward Freddie Reynold said he wished I’d asked him. I could have seconded that. Luckily my uncle Bill insisted on saying a few words about me, and very generous they were, too.

As for my dad, his is the one telegram I can now remember: “Congratulations from the proud father of the beautiful bride. Absent wounded.”

Late that night Tony sat down on the edge of the bed in our hotel bedroom in the Cotswolds. “Well,” he said, still dressed in his striped trousers and braces, “that was the worst day of my life.” Nothing to do with me, he explained. He was just overwhelmed with sadness that his mother hadn’t been there.

Chapter 10

Politics

A
fter months of fruitless searching, we eventually found a house we liked in Mapledene Road, Hackney, due west of London Fields and a stone’s throw from Maggie’s. Although it was more than we could afford, at least no DIY was involved, as developers were doing the renovation. It was still a building site when we bought it, so Tony moved into Maggie’s with me. (He had kept his room at Charlie Falconer’s right up till the wedding.)

We moved into our first real home shortly before Christmas 1980, when I persuaded my husband to carry me across the threshold. After the unconventional proposal, it was the least he could do. Number 59 was at the end of a row of four early Georgian houses. Then there was a gap before another row began, this time Victorian. The end one of these was empty when we moved in. The municipal authority, what we call the council, was supposed to be fixing it up, but in the meantime it was attracting vagrants and thieves. During our first six months we were burgled three times. It didn’t help that both Tony and I were out all day. The miscreants would climb over the garden wall, then break the back door, which had glass panels. Once a family moved in next door, the stealing stopped.

The first time it happened I lost all my jewelry — nothing that valuable, but it all meant something. David had always given me jewelry for my birthday, and everything went, including a lovely silver and black enamel bracelet he had given me for my twenty-first birthday. I also lost a gold sovereign on a chain that Grandad Jack had given me.

Neither the jewelry nor the culprits were ever found, but it was obvious where the thieves had come from. Across the road from us was one of the poorest housing projects — what we call estates — in Britain. Canvassing there during the local elections was a salutary experience and a real eye-opener for Tony, who had never come across social deprivation on this scale. People were so frightened, they would barricade themselves in their flats behind fortified doors. I had never seen Tony so angry. Night after night he would come back determined to do something about the crime and antisocial behavior that plagued such places.

Yet just across the Queensbridge Road were some of the nicest houses in north London and — thanks to their insalubrious neighbors — still affordable. Like-minded people were moving in. Future Labour cabinet minister Charles Clarke and his wife were near neighbors, and Barry Cox, a producer with London Weekend Television, became a close friend.

Whenever I relocated, I moved my Labour Party membership. When I first moved into Maggie’s in Wilton Way, I joined the Hackney Labour Party, in which she was already involved. By the time Tony and I bought Mapledene Road, I was on the local party’s General Management Committee. I was also a school governor. I’d been one before, and even though Tony and I had yet to have a child, I wanted to be involved. Governors have a very important role to play in the running of a school, as they are the ones who appoint the teachers and the head teacher. In my view, a school stands or falls on the quality of its teachers, so I wanted to make sure we got it right. I was chair of governors at Queensbridge Road Infant School and on the board of Haggerston Girls School.

Now that I was legally qualified, I could also offer more specialized help. I advised and helped set up the Hackney branch of the Child Poverty Action Group and provided legal advice for the National Council of Civil Liberties. Back in Liverpool, I had followed the local tradition of doing things for charity whenever I could — it was how communities survived. As a teenager, of course, I would stand on street corners rattling tins, as the YCS was regularly involved in collecting money for specific causes. I particularly remember a twenty-four-hour vigil we had in Liverpool City Centre for Biafra during the war and subsequent famine. We slept overnight in the Catholic chaplaincy. Needless to say, a lot of canoodling went on, but nothing too terrible. It was simply a combination of social action and socializing.

As I began to build up experience in family law, I was asked to help out at a law center in Tower Hamlets, an impoverished borough in London’s East End. The University House Legal Advice Centre was run by the marvelous Ann Wartuk, a formidable and down-to-earth woman who, in some respects, reminded me of my grandma. She terrified everyone and could be quite a prickly character, but she certainly got things done.

Three of us — myself, Ann, and another lawyer — would go there every Wednesday evening. Ann would have seen people during the week, and our job was to give advice to those who needed to take things a step further or who needed more information than Ann could provide. The place itself was a wreck. No money had been spent on it, and in the winter we would sit there with our coats on as the gas heaters hissed in the background.

I was involved in two major areas. First were the horrendous housing problems. People would come in with bits of wall or wallpaper with plaster attached, stuff that was just rotting away with damp or infested with cockroaches. Some of it was old housing stock, Victorian or even earlier, but equally bad — and even more shameful in some respects — was the newer housing. It was quite hard in those days to get legal aid to take on the housing cases, so I would do what I could in the way of writing letters to the council in an effort to get families rehoused.

Second was domestic violence. I could refer most of that to solicitors, and I would even see some of these people again as formal clients. This was when I saw housing conditions firsthand. The fact that these women were living in terrible physical circumstances was not helping their situations.

In the early 1980s, the Labour Party was going through troubled times. The James Callaghan government of 1976–1979 had failed to deal effectively with the unions, and the country had reeled under strike after strike, leaving the door wide open for the Conservatives and Margaret Thatcher, who had swept into power in May 1979. I remember sitting in the polling station at Abercorn Place just feeling the votes slipping away, while at the same time being fascinated by the idea that Britain was about to get its first female Prime Minister.

In November 1980 Callaghan resigned as Labour leader. The leadership was now up for grabs, and with the election of Michael Foot, the left was clearly ascendant. The spectrum of people who were paid-up members of the Labour Party now ranged from hard-left neo-Trotskyists, known officially as “Militant” (after their magazine) or, rather more disparagingly, the Trots; to those on the right, who, despairing of Foot’s ability to deal with Militant, peeled off to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in what was known as the Limehouse Declaration in early 1981. While not wanting to move to the right, people like Tony and me found ourselves somewhere in the middle of this arc. We believed that the Trots represented a mad, extreme form of Labour that was never going to do anything for anybody, yet we felt strongly that nothing would be achieved by jumping ship and defecting to the SDP. If we wanted to get rid of the Trots, we had to stay and work internally to do just that. Political power was unattainable, we both believed, without the support of the unions and the working class, so the only viable option was to stand and fight within the party. With that firmly in mind, we joined an organization called the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, which was a left-of-center, non-Trotskyist group.

Around the same time, Derry had been approached by his fellow Scot and near contemporary John Smith — a rising star in the Labour firmament and a member of the Shadow Cabinet (the group of senior opposition spokesmen who form a parallel Cabinet) — to advise on the legal status of Militant members within the Labour Party. When Derry brought Tony in to act as his junior, he couldn’t have known what the repercussions would be. The more Tony saw what was happening from the inside, the more incensed he became. What Militant was attempting was little short of a takeover, he believed. He would come home at night raging. Tinkering around at the edges was useless, he said. The only way to achieve anything was through mainstream politics: in other words, through becoming an MP. Everything else was a waste of time and effort.