As a top lawyer who also happens to be married to Britain’s prime minister, Cherie Blair can hardly avoid being much in the public eye. Yet since the day in May 1997 when she began occupying the prime minister’s official London residence, 10 Downing Street, she has made every possible effort to protect the privacy of herself and her family. Often seen but seldom heard, this highly successful career woman has assiduously played the part of the dutiful, diplomatic, self-effacing consort.
This December, however, and within a matter of days, Mrs. Blair’s carefully nurtured public image was ruined. At a time when momentous questions confront the British government — not least the looming possibility of British participation in war against Iraq — Britain’s domestic political agenda has become sunk in interminable questions about the propriety of her private behavior. Was she telling the truth about her involvement with Peter Foster, the convicted Australian fraudster who had apparently assisted her over the purchase of two flats in Bristol, one of them intended for her eldest son, who is a university student there? Moreover, did she attempt to intervene in the deportation case that faces Foster, who is the partner of Mrs. Blair’s close friend, Carole Caplin?
To begin with, Mrs. Blair took refuge behind official Downing Street denials about her connection with Foster. But when the Daily Mail published e-mails exchanged between her and Foster regarding the purchase of the Bristol flats, this posture became impossible to sustain. All of a sudden, the reticent, privacy-obsessed Mrs. Blair found herself the object of public curiosity as never before, with the media subjecting her whole existence to furious scrutiny. Acres of newsprint and endless airtime have now been devoted to “Cheriegate”, to a political imbroglio just as damaging to Mr. as to Mrs. Blair. The Blairs discomfiture is extreme; after all, Tony Blair came to power promising to rid British public life of “sleaze”, of the routine malpractice with which his Tory opponents had become synonymous.
Nor is it certain that this hideously embarrassing episode has yet run its course.
Last week, Mrs. Blair finally had no choice but to confront her accusers. Addressing the massed ranks of the British media, she denied that she had done anything improper and insisted that she had originally had no knowledge of Peter Foster’s disreputable past. If she had acted mistakenly in involving him in the buying of the Bristol flats, it was because as a busy woman with a career to pursue and four children to look after, she was only too ready to avail herself of a seemingly sincere offer of help; if she had made enquiries on Foster’s behalf over his deportation case, it was out of loyalty to her best friend. Tremulous and tearful, she invited ordinary people to sympathize with her as fellow human being who means well (she did not fail to mention her activities as a charity worker) yet who now, through no real fault of her own, has become the hapless victim of a media witch-hunt.
Evidently some do indeed sympathize with Cherie Blair as a “stressed-out” mother struggling to reconcile competing domestic and professional commitments. There are even those who believe that the Daily Mail’s vilification of her is rooted in misogyny, in right-wing male chauvinist resentment at her achievement in combining motherhood with getting to the summit of the British legal profession. It is, to be sure, true that the Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, nurses a particular dislike of Mrs. Blair. By all accounts, he felt revulsion when, during a dinner party at Downing Street at which he was a guest, Mrs. Blair broke off to breast feed her newborn baby.
Not that Mrs. Blair’s presentation of herself as being just like everybody else is exactly plausible. Her current unenviable predicament has its roots in her bizarre relationship with Carole Caplin, the “friend” whom she employs on a £4,000 a month contract as her “lifestyle guru”. It has transpired that Caplin introduced her to a “healer” who diagnoses ailments by dangling crystals over his patients’ bodies; she has also, it seems, put her in touch with her mother, a “medium” to whom Mrs. Blair is able to put questions that are bothering her. All the indications are that Cherie Blair is an extraordinarily neurotic, not to say tormented, woman; indeed, even prior to the onset of her present travails, she has seldom seemed like a person remotely at ease with herself.
Before Tony Blair came to power, the former Labour MP, Leo Abse, published a curious book. A “psychobiography”, The Man behind the Smile (1996) portrayed both the Blairs as tortured souls whose pursuit of power had less to do with political conviction than with an overmastering need to assuage the psychological injuries inflicted by their troubled upbringings. If the British people were to entrust their destiny to this dysfunctional couple, warned Abse, they would be courting national disaster.
Considering the mess that the Blairs, and Britain alike, are now in, his book is beginning to seem like alarmingly topical stuff.
• Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
