Speaking for Myself (28 page)
He turned round and walked over to us. We posed for a press shot, then somebody banged on that great heavy knocker, and the door opened.
New Dawn
O
ver the last few days of the campaign, Tony had been getting memos from the Cabinet office at Number 10, setting out how things actually worked. From the most basic (there was no direct dialing, for example; all calls went through the switchboard, which, we were told, was always known as “switch”), through to the “cast list”: who people were, what they did, whom they answered to — from the Cabinet secretary to messengers and “garden girls” (as, to my horror, the women who provided secretarial help were known). Ultimately, of course, they all answered to the Prime Minister, and now that was Tony.
Nothing can describe my mixture of emotions as the door closed behind me: not only awe in the historical sense — the knowledge that everyone from William Pitt to Winston Churchill had been there — but anxiety — that their baton, heavy with responsibility, had now been passed to Tony. There was also an undercurrent of unease. I felt like the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
must have when she arrived at Manderley for the first time. As the new Mrs. de Winter, she might have been the mistress of the house on paper, but in reality she was utterly powerless, because she had no idea what she was up against.
As we walked down the corridor lined with staff, I was reminded of the scene from the Hitchcock film of du Maurier’s novel: the old house, the servants lined up to greet their gawky, unsophisticated new mistress. And just as at Manderley, where the staff had all previously worked for Rebecca, these people now clapping us in were civil servants who’d been working for a Tory government for years and years, and there must certainly have been some among them who were hoping that our tenure would be short. None of our own people were there. It really felt like walking into the lion’s den. Later I realized that it was just as unsettling for them having to deal with us. While Sir Robin Butler, the head of the Civil Service, and Alex Allan, the principal private secretary to the Prime Minister, talked to Tony privately, the kids and I hung round in the corridor outside making faces at each other. After only a few minutes Tony emerged, raised his eyebrows, and took my hand in his. We were off to inspect the accommodations.
We’d been sent the ground plans several months before as part of the standard preelection contact between the Civil Service and the opposition, so to some degree I knew what to expect, though I have always found architects’ plans hard to visualize. Then, a few weeks previously, Jonathan had been allowed in to take a look. From what he’d seen, he thought the Number 10 flat would be too small for us, and although Number 11 — traditionally the domain of the Chancellor of the Exchequer — was definitely in need of a lick of paint, it was a much better place for a family. Our first stop, because it was nearer, was Number 10, so recently vacated by the Majors. Jonathan was right. Two bedrooms were a reasonable size, but the other two were very small. The five of us might just have squeezed in, but what about when my mum came to stay? Or Ros, come to that, without whom I could not function? Norma Major had redone the kitchen and knocked two rooms into one, but it, too, was a bit cramped, not helped by having such low ceilings.
The nicest thing about the flat was the bottle of champagne left there for us by the Majors, with a note saying, “Good luck. It’s a great job. Enjoy it.” A generous gesture and one I wouldn’t forget.
Number 11 was the only real option, we decided. It was on three floors, with rooms set round a central staircase. It turned out to be a whole house minus the ground floor, and although the shell was original, it had been gutted and totally rebuilt in the 1960s.
From the outside, Downing Street looks like a sedate Georgian terrace. The frontage, certainly, dates from the seventeenth century, but behind it everything opens out in a way one would never expect. Once inside, the only sign that these were originally individual residences are the multiple staircases. In 1735 the various individual buildings were connected by long corridors by the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Directly beneath the grand first-floor reception rooms, overlooking the garden and Horse Guards Parade, are the equally grand Cabinet room and the Prime Minister’s private office. Directly above the grand reception rooms are the distinctly ungrand rooms that make up the Number 10 flat.
The black-and-white-marble-floored entrance hall that lies immediately behind the front door is the domain of the custodians, as the doorkeepers are known, and all visitors to Downing Street enter this way before being escorted to their eventual destinations. Go straight ahead, and at the end of a long corridor, you arrive at the Cabinet room and the offices of the Prime Minister and his staff. Turn left, and you are in Number 11, the offices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, beyond that, the press office in Number 12. (What is known as the Number 11 flat actually extends above Number 12.)
We were introduced to this labyrinth of staircases and passages by Carol Allan, the house manager, and John Holroyd, in charge of protocol. They had both been at Downing Street a long time and knew the building well. I told them that I hadn’t made up my mind about what we were going to do. Above all, I said, we didn’t want to disrupt the children too much, and we certainly didn’t want to move their schools. Nicky was in his last term at St. Joan of Arc, so in the back of my mind I was thinking that we would possibly stay in Richmond Crescent at least till the end of term, and maybe we’d move in over the summer.
Apart from the hall, Number 11 had plenty of light, and the rooms were all high ceilinged and generally spacious. As we walked round, I realized that it was a good deal bigger than Richmond Crescent. Yes, it was very old-fashioned — it had last been done up many years before with an unattractive mustard-colored carpet and flocked wallpaper — but we’d already been told it could be redecorated. The worst thing was the haze of cigar smoke that clung to everything. It was like going into a jazz club on a Sunday morning before the cleaners arrived — an all-too-enduring legacy of John Major’s last Chancellor.
The children, however, were entranced. They’d already discovered a secret spiral staircase that led directly down to the garden. And what a garden! “It’s as big as the park,” I overheard an excited Kathryn telling a friend later. The bedrooms had already been divvied up. Shrieks of “Bags, I have this one!” rang out from upstairs. Euan had gone for one with an enormous desk, only to discover later that once the desk had been removed, the room itself was smaller than his younger brother’s. The problem with the bedrooms was the lack of storage, beyond a series of heavy mahogany wardrobes that smelled of mothballs and cedar. My heart sank at the sight of the kitchen. It might have been state-of-the-art in the sixties, but that was then. The sink had ancient faucets you could barely get a kettle under, and everything was incredibly utilitarian and bleak, with a beat-up pine table in the middle.
Then every so often it would hit me: what was I thinking of, complaining about sinks, when our little family was about to embark on an extraordinary voyage? In some ways I was too overwhelmed to take it all in, and I needed the children’s excitement to bring home what had really happened and where we were. Tony was Prime Minister! This was Downing Street! Who cared about faucets!
“You’ve given me food for thought,” I told Carol as we made our way down the staircase outside the front door of the flat on the first floor.
“When you know what you want to do, just give me a call,” she said. The trouble was that I had no idea what I wanted to do. Tony was anxious to keep everything the same as it was, for both him and the kids. It was barely two years since we’d got Richmond Crescent as we wanted it. Even the idea of going through all that again made my heart sink. And yet I knew that the most important thing was for us all to be together as a family, as we had always been. And although it would involve a lot of work, Number 11 had an amazing amount of space. But it had to be a family decision, and that meant the kids’ opinions were vitally important.
By the time we got down from our tour, friends and family were milling around the state dining room, already making inroads into the buffet lunch that had been laid on. The kids, faced with this huge table of food, had gone completely wild. The hubbub was tremendous — adults, children, everyone buzzing — and admonishments to calm down were totally disregarded. The whole building seemed to be ringing with shrieks and laughter, and I remember wondering whether it had ever seen such a day in its entire history.
Outside, the sun continued to shine, and while the children careered around, the bemused and slightly shell-shocked grown-ups sat in the garden, took photographs, and generally marveled at where we were and what had happened. I’d be chatting normally, then suddenly catch someone’s eye, and we would both burst into fits of spontaneous laughter. I felt like punching the sky! He had done it! My husband had done it!
Around five it was time to go. After all the pumping of adrenaline and excitement, we had run out of steam, and we simply went home. It was surreal. One moment we were sitting on the terrace outside the Cabinet room at Number 10, and the next moment I was in the kitchen at Richmond Crescent, poking round in the fridge, wondering what to do about supper.
Lying in bed later that night, trying to get to sleep, I thought back over our day: so many extraordinary moments I was determined not to forget. As we’d come out of the audience with the Queen, I’d asked Tony what had happened. “I mean, did you really have to kiss hands?”
“Not exactly,” he said. Before he went in, the Lord Chamberlain had explained that actual kissing wasn’t required. It was more like “a brushing of lips over her hand.” Next thing, Tony was ushered into her presence. Seeing the outstretched hand, he began to move forward, then somehow — feeling both bemused and nervous — he tripped over the edge of the carpet and ended up falling on top of the hand with an ardor that neither he nor Her Majesty was anticipating.
Her composure was quite unruffled, he said, and with a reassuring smile, she told him that he was her tenth Prime Minister and that her first, Winston Churchill, had been in office before Tony was even born.
“Don’t worry,” I told him, as we settled into the car on our way to Downing Street. “I know that her tenth Prime Minister is going to be as good as the first, even if his hand-kissing technique could do with brushing up.”
Though exhausted, we slept not much better than we had the night before. Our bedroom was on the first floor, the bed between the two front windows, and the nonstop racket in the street — police needing to chat and talk every two hours when they changed shifts — made sleep practically impossible. As I lay there, staring at the ceiling, it became obvious, as it hadn’t been before, that staying in our old house wasn’t viable if we were to have any privacy at all. Tony couldn’t possibly run the country from here, and we didn’t want to be separated, which meant that we would all have to move into Downing Street. The security people had made it clear that if we stayed in Richmond Crescent, it would be turned into something resembling a detention center. The glass in all the windows had already been changed, and special curtains had been put up. The road itself was cordoned off with bollards at both ends. It was unfair to expect our neighbors to put up with this. They hadn’t asked for any of it.
At around six o’clock a truck arrived, and some men began to dismantle the scaffolding erected for the press. As I lay there, listening to the clanging and banging outside, I thought about the logistics of it all. The best time to do the move, I decided, would be half term, which was in about three weeks.
I can’t remember now exactly what time the bell went off, sometime around eight-thirty. Ros was two floors up, still asleep — officially she was off-duty on weekends — and as nobody else was getting it, I pressed the intercom.
“Flower delivery for you, Mrs. Blair.” It was one of the policemen.
“Can’t you just put them inside the door?”
“ ’Fraid not. I’m here on my own.”
I padded down to the front door and opened it, yawning, hair like a bird’s nest, and bleary-eyed.
What awaited me outside was more than a nice bouquet from the governing body of St. Joan of Arc. If the marketing people wanted me to be like the woman in the street, they couldn’t have planned it better. The photographer outside my door clicked away, and soon every tabloid editor in the world knew exactly what picture would go on the front page that Sunday. No doubt the photographer made a fortune.
As I shut the door, I remember leaning my forehead against the back of it, my eyes closed, thinking,
Oh, my God, Tony will kill me
. I could just hear him saying, “How could you be so stupid as to go down in your nightdress without even putting on a dressing gown?” In fact, he didn’t. He had more pressing matters to attend to. Nevertheless, despite all the effort over the past weeks to turn me into a suitable consort for the Prime Minister, I ended up looking like the madwoman from the attic. (I did object to how my nightdress was mocked, however. It was a perfectly respectable gray cotton nightie — all natural fibers, not remotely cheap and nasty as the press claimed.)
Over breakfast I told the kids how I felt. The business with the flowers had put the final nail in the coffin of any idea I’d clung to of staying where we were. We couldn’t. The press would be there the whole time; the entire neighborhood would be disrupted. I told them that I thought we should probably move to Downing Street, and I was wondering about half term.
“Why wait till then?” they chorused. “We’ve chosen our bedrooms, so why don’t we just move in now?” They were very firm. If we did it on Monday, the May bank holiday, they’d be back in school by Tuesday.
I called Carol Allan. She would meet me at Number 10 in an hour, she said. With Nicky and Kathryn safely off to their music lessons, Ros and I left for Downing Street to play musical chairs. The Civil Service considers Number 10 and Number 11 government property and didn’t want us to bring our own furniture into the building. This presented problems. The two sofas in the former Chancellor’s sitting room were very down-at-heel, and nothing had been touched for years. Knowing that Gordon wasn’t going to be using the Majors’ flat, I felt quite comfortable about taking what we needed from there. I arranged for a sideboard, some lamps, and two sofas to be brought over, though they were a bit too small. Kathryn inherited the twin beds from the Majors’ spare room, complete with Laura Ashley sprigged bedcovers. I wanted each of the kids to have two beds so that friends could stay, and it turned out there were a couple in storage that we could have. The same with desks and wardrobes.