Speaking for Myself (43 page)

There came a point where André could stand it no longer. “How can you do this to her? Just look at what you are doing to her! I’m going to tell someone. You cannot do this to her,” he said, and stormed off.

In the mirror was a face I barely recognized. My chin was wobbling. My reflection was blurred as I blinked to try to control the tears. On my dressing table were photographs of all the children. If things had gone differently, in two months’ time there would have been another one . . .

I was forced to issue a statement saying that Peter Foster was involved. “Damage limitation” is the term, I think.

I bumped into one of the press officers in the corridor beneath the flat at the entrance to the press office. “I’m so sorry all this is going on, Cherie,” he said.

Fiona’s take was slightly different. “Everyone in the press office hates you,” she told me. “They’ve told lies on your behalf, and none of them ever wants to work for you again. They want nothing more to do with you.”

We passed a frosty weekend at Chequers. Tony was on the phone most of the time, in his study, the door closed. Iraq. Alan was making his usual Christmas puddings, and I went with the children to have a stir and make a wish, while Jackie was keeping everybody cheerful. I found it all very, very hard. It was about to get worse. On Sunday the
News of the World
got in on the act. We later discovered that they had offered Peter Foster £100,000 to tell his story. Now they were questioning the discounts on my clothes. That night Bill Clinton dropped in at Downing Street and gave me a big hug.

On Monday the ninth Peter Foster’s solicitors issued a statement saying that I had contacted them about his deportation case but that I hadn’t intervened in any way, that it had been only to reassure Ms. Caplin. This, of course, did more harm than good. But it was true. I had phoned them, but all I was doing was checking that everything that should have been done had been done. I knew perfectly well that he hadn’t a chance of winning his appeal. His record — prison terms on three continents, including in Britain — spoke for itself, but I wasn’t going to say that to my friend. And she
was
still my friend. I had just heard that she had lost her baby.

André arrived at 8.00 a.m. to do my hair. That night I had a reception for the Loomba Trust, whose aim it is to educate the children of widows in India. In the afternoon I had my annual children’s Christmas party. Every year children from one charity are invited for tea. Father Christmas comes and there’s an entertainer, and at the end we turn on the lights on the tree outside the front door. I’d try to enjoy myself, but I felt like a pariah.

André was just getting started when Alastair came storming into the bedroom. Until now he had refused to talk to me, either sending in Hilary to do his dirty work or using Tony as a go-between. I think even Tony didn’t want him to talk to me, instead putting himself between us as a shield because he knew Alastair was so angry.

“That’s it,” Alastair said, his arms folded, as he looked at me via the mirror. “It’s now political. The Tories are asking questions, and your husband is going to have to answer them. One more time, Cherie, did you at any point have anything whatever to do with the immigration case?”

“I’ve told you, no. You’re determined to humiliate me, aren’t you? I know you’ve been briefing against me.”

“I don’t need to. You do it all on your own.”

“Don’t you dare talk to Cherie like that!” André exploded.

“You mind your own business,” Alastair retorted. “Remember, you’re just a fucking hairdresser.”

“Apologize,” I said.

“I don’t think so.” Alastair snorted. “For the last time, I want that woman out of your life.”

“She has just lost a baby; her boyfriend is threatened with deportation. I’m not going to abandon her. I’ve said I won’t talk to her, isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t forget, you brought all of this on yourself.”

I felt terrible for Carole and very weepy. The news about the miscarriage had taken me straight back to that dreadful afternoon, only a few months before, when I’d been lying upstairs bleeding. Even with four children already, I had felt utterly bereft. How Carole was feeling, I could only imagine. Banned as I was from any contact, I couldn’t even comfort her. The whole situation was ridiculous. Tony could talk to her, but I couldn’t.

That morning I spent an hour with Lady Wilson, the wife of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, talking about her life in Number 10 in the 1960s and 1970s. Listening to her, I realized that little had changed in forty years. She had often been lonely and unhappy. She was the first of the Downing Street wives who came from a background that wasn’t “establishment.” Her son Giles had been a teenager when they’d moved into the Number 10 flat, and even after all these years, it pained her to remember the impossibility of him simply getting in and out without a great song and dance being made of it. She remembered how she would wake in the middle of the night to find a garden girl at the end of the bed taking dictation from her husband. To retain her sanity, she told me, she would take the bus to north London, where they used to live, and cry on the shoulders of friends. The lack of privacy, the loss of identity — I heard the same stories over and over again: different women, different backgrounds, different generations, but all bound together by a strong sense of public service, seeing their role as that of support and comfort to the Prime Minister.

Just before lunch André called me from the salon. “How are you feeling?”

“Not great, André.”

“You know I’m not her greatest fan, but I think you need to see Carole.”

“She’s banned.”

“That’s my idea. You meet at my flat!”

“But when?”

“This afternoon. I have it all worked out. You turn the Christmas lights on with the kids, and I’ll be waiting out back.”

“You mean just walk out?”

“I mean just walk out. Don’t tell anybody. Be very naughty. Give them the slip!”

“But I’ve got the Loomba Trust reception.”

“I’ll get you back for that. Promise.”

So that’s what happened. Between three and four-thirty I was down in Number 10 for the children’s Christmas party. Once the tree ceremony was over, I walked back in through the Downing Street front door, turned left, and pushed the button for the Number 11 lift. I didn’t normally bother to take the lift up one flight of stairs, and this was no exception: I didn’t go up; I went down, down into the basement, through the comms office, and out into the back parking lot, where André was waiting. Nobody stopped me; nobody even seemed to notice. His flat is in Berwick Street, in Soho. Carole was already there, he said. He’d be waiting in the café across the road. But we didn’t have much time. “Half an hour tops,” he warned me. It was a few minutes after five.

She was in a bad way. Very upset, very contrite, very tearful, not least because she had lost the baby. I told her that I wouldn’t abandon her, that as far as I was concerned, she had done no wrong. Did it do any good? I don’t know. But we both had a cry, and I think we both felt better. She showed me the contract that Ian Monk had negotiated with the
Mail on Sunday
for her to contribute a weekly column. She pointed out the bit that said, “Any reference to Mrs Cherie Blair shall appear only after prior approval.” She would never talk about us, she said. Then I had to go. Any idea that I wouldn’t be found out was ridiculous, of course. I had been seen leaving on the security cameras, but at least they hadn’t had time to follow us and didn’t know where I was going. It felt like a victory.

When we got back, André gave me a hug. Then I opened the car door and walked in the way I’d left. I nodded to the uniformed officer on duty. He nodded back and picked up the phone. The prisoner had returned.

The next day it got worse. The Tories were calling for an official inquiry. I couldn’t stand it anymore; I was just shaking. Alastair had had more questions through from the
Daily Mail,
implying that I had been trying to exert pressure on a judge. The law was my life! How could anybody think I could do such a thing? Yet Alastair was asking me as if it were a real possibility. I felt so angry that when they said they wanted me to make a statement, I agreed. They wrote it.

Eventually I added in some stuff about Carole. Alastair wasn’t happy, but I didn’t care. It was supposed to be my statement, after all. That evening I was due to present the Partners in Excellence awards, which as patron I did every year, to organizations involved with affordable child care and associated services. The venue was the Atrium restaurant, just beyond the House of Commons. Fiona suggested that we use it as a platform.

As I got into the car, Fiona sat grim-faced beside me. From the moment we passed the barriers into Whitehall, it began: flashlights against the windows of the car, the shouts of the photographers. Never before or since have I felt so hounded. I was their prey. It was that simple. Past the House of Commons, on to the Embankment, then finally we were there. The nice new ’tec opened the door, and an arm from somewhere guided me in, the lights blinding me, the voices shouting. Once inside, I stood there trembling, checking to see if the microphone was turned on. My statement had been timed at nine minutes. Just another nine minutes, and it would all be over. And these good people thought they were getting a speech on children and excellence. I thought,
They are the ones I should be apologizing to. All their hard work, and they get this charade.
A nod from Fiona, and I’m on.

“In view of all the controversy around me at the moment, I hope you don’t mind me using this event to say a few words. . . . You can’t fail to know that there have been a lot of allegations about me and I haven’t said anything, but when I got back to Downing Street today and discovered that some of the press are effectively suggesting that I tried to influence a judge, I knew that the time had come for me to say something. It is not fair to Tony or the government that the entire focus of political debate at the moment is about me.”

Tony was at his weekly audience with the Queen, but he saw it later on the news. There was a moment toward the end when I nearly broke down, when I mentioned Euan having left home. What we’d wanted for him in Bristol, most of all, was that he would be safe, that he would be away from the press. He’d had all that furor over going to school, then there had been the drinking episode, and he’d gone to Bristol to get away from all that. And now here he was, tangentially at least, caught up in this. I’d dragged my son, whom I’d wanted to protect, into the news. My girlfriend, who had just lost a much-wanted baby, was being hounded by the press. And on top of all that, I had to try to keep going with all my official engagements and keep relatively calm at home so that the other children didn’t get too upset. All of that I could cope with, but the mention of Euan’s name was the thing that tipped me over.

One day, a few months before the 1997 election, Philip Gould had told me that Tony was going on a long journey, and that neither his past friends nor the office could go all the way with him. The only one who could do that was me, and I needed to make sure I was by his side supporting him. I took those words to heart and vowed always to be there for him. So the worst aspect for me of the whole Bristol flats nightmare was that I had let Tony down. At the moment in his life when he needed me most, I was a drag on his energies rather than a source of support.

Yet however bad things were, I never felt that he had abandoned me. For a quarter of a century, we had been not only lovers but best friends. I always knew there would be things that Tony couldn’t talk about, but I also knew that he would never lie to me, which was why I was 100 percent behind him over Iraq and the threat Saddam Hussein represented to world order. His preoccupation with what he had to do and the consequences for individual lives, both British troops and Iraqi civilians, weighed on him night and day, awake and asleep. In trying to get the UN Security Council to force Saddam to comply with its resolutions, he faced a titanic struggle. He was tireless in his efforts to persuade the Americans not to act unilaterally, while at the same time attempting to galvanize the rest of the world into action when it was clear that the language of diplomacy was no longer enough. Although 2002 had undoubtedly been a bad year for me, whatever problems I had faded into insignificance compared to what he had on his plate.

Following that splendid tenet of tabloid journalism “no smoke without fire,” “Cheriegate,” as it was wittily dubbed, dragged on for weeks, until eventually the press just got bored. The only positive thing to emerge were the letters I received in commiseration: the charities I was involved with, colleagues at the Bar and on the Bench, politicians from both sides of the House, priests and vicars, monks and nuns, friends and people I had never met and never would. I even got a kind letter from Prince Charles. I replied to them all, but those people will never know just how much their support meant to me.

Eventually Peter Foster was deported. (One of his more spectacular claims, worth including for its sheer audacity, was that Tony was the father of Carole’s baby.) He is now in prison in Australia, serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud. A few months after he was deported, he was in touch with the
Mail
again, sending it copies of fabricated e-mails purporting to show that I had tried to channel funds through an offshore tax haven. He clearly had no idea of how little money we had. The
Mail,
naturally, demanded yet more answers. This time, thanks to my accountant’s thorough forensic investigation of my entire computer system, Downing Street was able categorically to deny the whole thing. The
Mail
decided not to run the story.

The reverberations continued to rumble round Downing Street. There were more cross-examinations by Hilary Coffman. There was a belief that Carole had taken clothes either for me or herself without paying for them. I was required to contact everyone who had ever supplied me with clothes and get written assurance that the discounts I’d been given were standard, that there had been no special favors. That turned out not to be sufficient. The new Cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, told me that I had to repay the discounts. I refused. I wanted to know on what authority he was able to interfere with personal contracts I had made. “You show me the law that says that I have to pay this back, and I will do it. Otherwise I will not.” Eventually a private secretary was assigned to investigate the whole business of the clothes. She told me that she would try to work out a better scheme, where the rules would be clearly set out.