Speaking for Myself (36 page)

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s not his baby. Why doesn’t he just say he doesn’t know?”

“Because he does know.”

“But who could have told the
Mirror
?”

“Lauren?”

“No. She doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her.” And anyway, I knew that my half sister would never betray me, not over a thing like that. I went through everybody in my head. Sally Morgan wouldn’t do it, nor Anji, even though I hadn’t wanted her to know. I was sure it couldn’t have come from the hospital. The scan had been registered under a different name, and they hadn’t put me on the computer. That left Gordon. But what could he possibly have to gain by telling the
Daily Mirror
?

I called Alastair: “Why can’t you just say that it’s early days and we don’t want to announce it yet?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cherie. This is his big scoop.”

“I don’t want Piers Morgan to have a big scoop over my body, thank you very much.”

“Okay, then we’ll put it out over PA [Press Association]. The only way to handle it now is to make it a non-
Mirror
exclusive.” This suited Alastair, because if Piers did get a scoop, the other papers would be furious. For Alastair, dealing with the tabloids was like juggling with raw eggs.

“We’ll have a quote from Tony and a quote from you,” he said, and hung up.

On the way to the meeting, Fiona’s cell phone rang. It was Rebekah Wade, deputy editor of the
Sun
. “The announcement must be out — you might as well talk to her,” Fiona mouthed.

I took the phone. I’d known Rebekah for some time and had a certain amount of respect for her: a woman making her way in the male world of Fleet Street.

We had a girly chat, along the usual just-pregnant lines, and that was that. The next morning this intimate girly conversation was plastered all over the
Sun
. From being a
Mirror
exclusive, it had become a
Sun
exclusive, and Piers was furious. To this day he remains convinced that I spoke to the
Sun
deliberately to thwart him. What I certainly didn’t know when I talked to Rebekah was that at the time Fiona handed me the phone, the news had not gone out on PA. It did go out eventually that night, but not till later. Though I have my suspicions about how the
Sun
found out, they have never been confirmed.

The truth is that Piers still had his scoop. He made sure everyone knew that he had got the story and that it was he who had forced Number 10 to go public. But Rebekah was the only person who actually spoke to me. Piers never forgave me for spoiling his party, and over the years his resentment turned into outright hatred.

From then on, Cherie and the pregnancy were everywhere. The coverage was so positive that we heard there were some in Gordon’s camp who thought we’d done it deliberately, to undermine Gordon. However, there was something rather unnerving about reading in the papers a score of doctors and professors going on about elderly mothers, the risks of brain damage, and the rest of it. “Of course she’ll have a cesarean,” the press said, and they had all the diagrams. But I thought,
Wait a minute, guys. This is my body and my decision!

My obstetrician, Zoë Penn, said that as Kathryn had been a cesarean, normal practice would be to have another. But I was adamant that because the aftermath last time had been so grim, unless it was dangerous to the baby, I wanted a vaginal birth. The concern was that the stress of labor would open up the scar, which would be damaging to me.

We were always very clear that if the baby was a boy, we would name him for Tony’s dad. He was going, as we declared, to be all the things that Grandpa Leo could have been but for the fact he’d had a stroke in his forties. Tony’s father loved politics and had once had ambitions to stand for Parliament himself — as a Tory! Now he was finding life even more frustrating, as he’d recently had another stroke and had lost the ability to speak. I was so convinced the baby was a boy that we didn’t really think of a girl’s name. Bookmakers were by then taking bets, and I remember Euan coming to me and saying, “Why don’t I just put a bet down?”

“Don’t you dare!” I said. “The press would have a field day, and rightly so.”

Among those who did put a bet on was a member of the Protestant negotiating team in the Northern Ireland talks. After the announcement he’d sidled up to Tony to congratulate him. “Great news, Tony. And what might you be thinking of calling the new arrival?”

Tony told him. A few months after Leo was born, Tony saw this same fellow, sporting an impressive tan. “You’re looking well,” he said. “Been on holiday?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “And all thanks to you. I got very good odds on Leo if the Blair baby turned out to be a boy, and the whole family got to go away on the proceeds.”

The other question that every parent is faced with is, where will the new baby go? The obvious place in our setup was Euan’s room, next door to ours. As Euan had just turned sixteen, the sensible thing was to put him on the attic floor above. It was currently being used as offices and a bedroom for the duty officer, but it would make a nice little flat, with a small bathroom already there. The duty officer would need somewhere to sleep, and as the Number 10 flat was still unused, that appeared to offer a solution. This time no way was I going to see Gordon, so it was all done through the office. Although Gordon agreed to release the rooms, there were conditions attached: he wanted to make clear that this was a short-term arrangement and that when Euan went to university — at this stage more than two years away — he wanted those rooms back. Tony agreed.

“What do you mean, you agreed? Where’s Euan going to live when he comes home for the holidays?” I demanded.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll never happen. Once we’ve got the rooms, it’ll never happen.” And indeed it never did. Euan moved upstairs, feeling very grown-up and not ousted by the new arrival at all.

Every November, at a ceremony to mark the official opening of Parliament, the government sets out its program for the following year. This is known as the Queen’s Speech, and it is indeed spoken by the Queen, although the words are written by the government. In 1997 one proposal in the Queen’s Speech concerned the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Britain was already bound by the convention, new legislation was required to allow pertinent cases to be dealt with on home ground, rather than at the European Court in Strasbourg. This plan would not be fully implemented until October 2000, but from 1998 on, like-minded people began to talk about the possibility of setting up an interdisciplinary set of chambers that had human rights at its heart. At the same time, these chambers would be modern, with cutting-edge computer systems and clerks who didn’t have to call us sir or miss. There were lawyers in London who did international law, but they were mainly commercial sets. There was also the odd barrister who did individual cases in Strasbourg, but these barristers were spread out across several sets of chambers and were all juniors. If this system was to take off, it needed a silk. Many of the people interested in the idea were either former pupils of mine or people I had brought on at Gray’s Inn Square. In all, there were five or six of us interested in the proposal.

Things began to firm up in October 1999, when David Wolfe came to see me. The first official meeting in this regard was at the Russell Hotel in Russell Square. About ten people were present. I was the only silk, and we talked about who else we might approach.

While discussions continued, we heard that the old police station at the end of Gray’s Inn, used by traffic wardens for the past few years, was being converted into offices by the Inn. One of the problems in setting up a new chambers with an entirely new ethos was finding a building that we wouldn’t need to share. We had imagined we’d have to move outside the Inn and take on a commercial lease. Now that this rare opportunity had presented itself, we had to grab it, even though we weren’t entirely ready. We all told our various chambers, and the die was cast.

As part of the belated modernization of our chambers at 4–5 Gray’s Inn Square, we recruited Amanda Illing, who had previously worked as private secretary to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Barbara Mills. By the spring of 2000, she had learned the skills of clerking under Leslie Page and Michael Kaplan, who had clerked for me. So Amanda became our first clerk, although she was never called that, except by me through a slip of the tongue. Now she was our practice manager, later practice director, and has been a source of strength throughout.

Inevitably people interested in the new set of chambers fell by the wayside. Whereas some wanted a niche practice, I was among those who favored something more encompassing. In the end we had twenty-six practitioners, and those of us who were silks had to personally guarantee the bank debt that would be needed to start up a new set.

Usually chambers are called after their physical address or, occasionally, lawyers a long time dead. “The Old Police Station” hardly sent out the right signals. Clare Montgomery, QC, a successful criminal fraud practitioner, came up with Matrix, meaning, according to a definition she found in a dictionary, the intersection of ideas. By this time the Bar was increasingly split into criminal and civil sets. We were doing the opposite, bringing together the disciplines but focusing on human rights and civil liberties. A submeaning of “matrix” turned out to be fertility. As I was pregnant, and four other members’ wives also were pregnant, this seemed a good omen. However, Matrix on its own, we decided, sounded a bit too radical. Thus Matrix Chambers was born.

Every aspect of the new chambers was subject to scrutiny. To start with, we were nonhierarchical. Instead of listing our members by seniority of call to the Bar, we were listed alphabetically, and the allocation of rooms was done by drawing lots. At the time, such innovations were seen as being radical and spurred much discussion.

By then, thanks to my familiarity with information technology, I was increasingly working from home. I finished my last case on May 17, 2000. To the delight of the press, it concerned parental leave. I was acting on behalf of the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) against the government, which, as we saw it, was taking too long to phase in parental leave under a European Union directive. Cartoonists went to town on the theme of
Blair v. Blair.
The hearing took place in the Lord Chief Justice’s court, and as I stood up, the Lord Chief Justice said, “In the circumstances, Ms. Booth, would you like to sit down?” I replied, “Thank you, but I’m better on my feet.”

I was, but he was right to ask: I was vast. I had been expecting the baby to come early — none of my other three having made forty weeks — and toward the end I was sleeping badly. I would get up, leaving Tony in bed, go next door into what would become the nursery, and sit in a rocking chair we had just bought. There, with the lights off, I would rock gently, looking out the window. At the back of the building, outside the back gate, I could see a photographer from the
Daily Mail,
waiting. The photographers came in shifts, day in, day out, for three weeks. I had this horror that when I went into labor, this photographer would burst in and take pictures. I thought,
I don’t want to bring this baby into the world with the
Mail
peering into my room. Why can’t I have this baby in private?

Since the beginning, the
Mail
had been at the forefront of every negative story going. If an unflattering photograph came its way, the editors would print it. That March the
Mail
had been approached by somebody notorious in the publishing world who was offering the manuscript of a memoir written by our former nanny Ros Mark. The paper must have known that I would fight this tooth and nail, and the result was
Blair v. Associated Newspapers,
which the paper lost. Ros had been naive, but the
Daily Mail
didn’t have that excuse.

The first we knew about the story was when Ros rang us in a panic. The
Mail
was outside the house in Lancaster where she was living as a student. The paper was trying to get an interview, she said. At this point we knew nothing about a book. We simply thought she was being harassed by the press, who’d found out about her connection with the Blairs. She didn’t know what to do, so I suggested she ring Alastair. He in turn rang the
Mail
and asked what the hell they thought they were doing, harassing our former nanny. The
Mail
told him that she had written a memoir and was trying to sell it. The paper had been sent extracts, the spokesperson said.

We were astonished. Everybody, including Tony and Alastair. We all knew Ros so well. She was a sweet, sporty girl who had a lot of love in her, which she had given freely to the children. She had been with us for four years, and it was hard to imagine how we would have coped with the transition from Richmond Crescent to Downing Street without her. By now Alastair was in touch with the literary agent who had approached the
Mail,
who implied, Alastair said, that Ros herself wasn’t the prime mover, but that her mother and brother were involved. Ros, it would seem, had simply provided the anecdotes and the details: the day-to-day life of a nanny in a chaotic but otherwise totally ordinary family that found itself in extraordinary circumstances.

In many ways it was a very warm depiction, but quite unpublishable as a book. From Tony’s and my point of view, it risked being at worst embarrassing. But in terms of our kids, it was impossible. No matter who you are, you cannot write about children in that way — their personal habits, tantrums, foibles, and illnesses, their quirky ways — no matter how lovingly recounted. It was a total invasion of their privacy.

As an employment lawyer, I had always had proper contracts with my nannies, all of which included a confidentiality agreement. In fact, when Tony became Leader of the Opposition, I had even had Ros sign another one, just to tie things up.

I spoke to the government’s legal department, which said it was a private matter. I then got on to my old friend Val Davies, now a partner in a big City firm, and asked her to take out an injunction, which she did.