Chapter 10
After 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.
Parliamentary politics is very different from local politics, and it required a change of focus. On a practical level, Tony began to do more trade union work, getting Derry to introduce him to his union solicitors. He also published an article against the need for a Bill of Rights, his thesis being that with a Bill of Rights, you would be entrusting power to nonelected judges, who are basically white and upper-middle-class.
Union membership was mandatory if you wanted to be a candidate, so while Tony signed up with the Transport and General Workers Union (T & G) in the northeast, I ended up in the central London branch of MATSU, the white-collar arm of the General and Municipal Boilermakers Union (GMB). It was a complete farce. The only people who turned up at board meetings were people like us, who’d basically joined the unions to get credibility and to get on the candidate list.
To get himself known, Tony put himself forward to give lectures at trade union conferences. Barristers were still viewed with suspicion by such audiences, and that was where I came in. I was his passport to working-class acceptability: “I might be posh, but this is my working-class wife, whose father is Tony Booth — you know, the well-known left-winger.” At the end of these things, there was usually some kind of sing-along, and inevitably that would be my cue.
“Cherie will now sing you some Liverpool songs,” Tony would announce, to tentative applause. Then I would put my hands together, open my mouth, and sing “The Leaving of Liverpool” or “In My Liverpool Home,” because Liverpudlians were always powerful in the trade union movement. Thus it was that Tony Blair and Cherie Booth got known within the regional Labour Party, and soon we were both actively looking for seats.
On October 1, 1981, the MP Sir Graham Page died. Though not exactly a household name, he had held my hometown, Crosby, for the Conservatives since 1953, and his death turned our old neighborhood into front-page news (which it had never been while he was alive). Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education in the Callaghan government, had lost her seat in the landslide Tory victory of 1979. This could be her chance for a comeback, though not for Labour: she was one of the founders of the SDP. Since she was a good Catholic girl, and the only woman in the Cabinet, her defection had struck me like a slap in the face. When it was announced that she was standing for my hometown (unlike in America, where candidates tend to have long roots in their districts, it is common in England for candidates to choose a race they think can win, even if far from home), I thought, For goodness’ sake. I’ll throw my hat in the ring! My father was incredibly excited, though I knew I wouldn’t have a hope in hell.
There was no grand plan, but I have always believed that if an opportunity comes along, you should grab it. Having been fascinated by politics for years, I felt I was at least as good as the other people I had seen put their names forward. If they could, why not me? I saw what was happening to Britain under Thatcher — unemployment and related misery rising inexorably. It wasn’t enough just to hope that somebody else would do something about it. That somebody could be me!
I didn’t even make the candidate short list, while Shirley Williams romped home to become the first SDP MP. However, it certainly got me thinking.
A few months later, at the end of February 1982, another Tory died: Sir Ronald Bell, MP for Beaconsfield, a small town about twenty miles west of London. This time Tony threw his hat into the ring. My father was partly responsible. Knowing that Tony was interested in getting into mainstream politics, my dad arranged for him to have lunch with an MP called Tom Pendry, and Tony came back that evening very excited. Tom had mentioned Beaconsfield; why didn’t he put himself forward for that? He wouldn’t win, but it would be good practice, and, more important, it was sure to be very high profile. Tom knew somebody quite senior in the local Labour Party, and he could put Tony in touch.
Beaconsfield had been Disraeli’s constituency, and basically it had remained Conservative ever since. The Beaconsfield Labour Party wasn’t exactly thriving, and it needed all the help it could get. During the monthlong campaign, Tony put his practice on hold and stayed with my mother in Oxford, driving into Beaconsfield every morning. He didn’t come back to Mapledene Road until after the election on May 27. I would join him in Oxford on weekends but otherwise stayed in London, going up by train to help him campaign whenever my commitments in court allowed.
The timing of the election couldn’t have been worse for a party in opposition. We were right in the middle of the Falklands War: Argentina had invaded the British-owned island of South Georgia in March, and at the end of April came the sinking of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano, with the loss of more than three hundred lives. The whole of England was in a state of war fever, with Margaret Thatcher cast in the role of Boadicea.
Everyone joined in the campaigning. Even our old friend Bruce Roe, a Conservative from birth, drove round the streets of Beaconsfield in a sports car, blasting out “Vote for Blair.” Tony’s family was there en masse: Sarah, Bill, and, of course, Tony’s dad, along with his new wife, Olwen. Leo and Olwen had married just four months after us. (I had kept the third tier of our wedding cake for them.) Olwen made all the difference in Leo’s life, and from my perspective she was a dream mother-in-law.
On the distaff side, Lyndsey, Auntie Audrey, and my mum chipped in. But the stars in the Booth camp were my dad and Pat Phoenix. By this time they were courting, if not actually an item. After he’d been released from the hospital in the summer of 1981, my father had returned to Ferndale Road, there being nowhere else for him to go. One evening when he and Grandma were watching Coronation Street, Grandma remembered that he had known Pat Phoenix, who played the show’s perennial sex symbol, Elsie Tanner, in the old days. She suggested that he look her up, and they reconnected.
The presence of Tony Booth and Pat Phoenix always guaranteed publicity. She in particular was an inspiration: always beautifully turned out, always with a ready smile, always gracious.
My dad didn’t share Pat’s innate sense of decorum, however. One afternoon we were touring the district’s villages, with Pat and my father leading the way in one car and Tony and I in the car behind. As we were enjoying rural England at its most beautiful — hedges overflowing with bluebells and cow parsley — my dad decided to liven things up a bit by playing “Give Peace a Chance” over the loudspeakers. This was immediately after the sinking of the Belgrano, so it was not a good idea on many levels.
Tony was having none of it. “For God’s sake, man, turn that racket off!” he yelled out the window. It took some time for my father to comply, because he simply didn’t hear: Tony Blair versus John Lennon at full volume was no competition. My husband failed to see the humor in it. Fortunately, the message of peace and love, and the subsequent altercation, was heard only by the cows.
Most campaigning is not that glamorous. Knocking on doors, smile at the ready and leaflet in hand, is not everyone’s idea of fun. But I have always loved it, not least because I love meeting people, which ultimately is what it is all about. Whether I have ever persuaded anyone to vote for someone they wouldn’t otherwise have voted for is another question. But I could never be accused of being a shrinking violet.
I don’t think the Beaconsfield Labour Party had any idea what energy and commitment they had got in Tony Blair. It is hard to imagine a group of party activists more fired with enthusiasm, and the atmosphere was tremendous. Of course, by no stretch of the imagination was Beaconsfield winnable, so the most important job was to identify who the Labour supporters were and to make sure they cast their votes, which was important psychologically both to Tony and to the party at large. I was happy to do anything required of me, particularly asking, in the nicest possible way, whether they were intending to support the young and vibrant Labour candidate, who also happened to be my husband. Whenever we could, Tony and I campaigned together, working our way through the electoral roll of the town and its satellite villages, one street at a time. It was a long process, but we were so happy in our joint endeavor. Tony was in his element. Everyone loved him, even die-hard Tory matrons, who once they saw it was the candidate himself coming down the drive, would personally open their front doors to shake his hand (though a couple did set their dogs on him).
Midway through the campaign, Tony took time off to be best man for his brother. Bill was marrying Katy Tse from Hong Kong. The wedding was behind Manchester Square, just north of Oxford Street, but the timing was very tight. I brought Tony’s morning suit with me, so he dashed in from Beaconsfield, changed, performed his duties, and then dashed straight back again, not realizing that he was still in his wedding outfit. A prospective Labour candidate could hardly campaign dressed like that, so as soon as he realized what he had done, he had to dash back to the church again.
Tom Pendry had been right: Beaconsfield was as high profile as they come. Among those who turned up to show their support for the Labour candidate was Michael Foot, then party leader, who came up and had lunch with Tony. Tony had discovered that they were both fans of P. G. Wodehouse, and the poor man was almost in tears, so happy to find someone with whom he could talk about Jeeves and Wooster — much preferred to being harangued about policies by the Labour left.
The whole Newsnight team was covering the by-election for BBC TV, and following this lunch, the candidate and the Labour leader were buttonholed outside the restaurant. “Whatever happens tomorrow,” Foot said, “in Tony Blair we have a man I know is going to go far in the Labour Party.” Not for the first time, P. G. Wodehouse had worked magic.
Tony’s campaign had been based on local concerns, not broader Labour mandates. For instance, he’d joined forces with a local pop star’s wife on an environmental issue. Indeed, toward the end of the campaign, a leaflet went out headed “Why Tories Are Voting for Blair.” It turned out to be prophetic, but not in Beaconsfield.
As expected, Tony lost to the Conservative candidate. But he made his mark and showed his skills at campaigning and bringing people together. I remember one journalist commenting, “In Tony Blair you have the candidate that every Tory mother would love their daughter to bring home as son-in-law.”
The night the results came in, the Labour Party–appointed press officer added a final sentence to Tony’s “acceptance” speech: “And that’s why I pledge that I’ll come back and fight this seat again in the eighty-three election.” When Tony saw this, he shook his head.
“I can’t say this, Cherie,” he said. “If I do, then I can wave good-bye to ever becoming an MP.”
“So take it out.”
“Well — you know, they’ve all been really great —”
“Don’t be silly. Take it out!”
He did.
After the election Michael Foot wrote Tony a very nice letter saying what a good candidate he’d been, that he felt Tony had a lot to offer the Labour Party, and not to despair.
In fact, Tony showed no signs of despair. Quite the contrary. By now he had the bug. He might be doing well at the Bar — he was both incredibly hardworking and proving to be a skilled advocate — but he now knew that what he really wanted was to be in Parliament. The problem was finding a winnable seat. Once an MP is elected, he or she tends to stay put, and deselection is rare.
Over the next eleven months we became like vultures. In June Tony tried for Mitcham and Morden and got nowhere. In February 1983 he went for Bermondsey and was again shut out. We both tried unsuccessfully for Oxford East — not a by-election, but everyone was now gearing up for the general election. I at least made it to the final selection.
Following the Labour candidate’s defeat in Bermondsey, all the failed by-election candidates were called in by the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to analyze what had happened. The view of everyone, apart from Tony, was that “we haven’t been left- wing enough.” It was then that Tony began to articulate what eventually became the political creed that led to New Labour.
What with all the excitement of Beaconsfield, we had failed to organize our vacation. Not for the first time, my mum came to the rescue with a hotel in Portugal that she could book for us through the office. As neither Tony nor I had been there before, it sounded like the perfect solution.
After his defeat, Tony had decided to concentrate on the northeast. First, a seat in the Labour heartland was more likely to be winnable, and second, it was where his roots were. As usual we worked through August, picking up bits and pieces, then one afternoon Tony called me in chambers.
“Good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that a seat in Middlesbrough has come up. I’ve had a word with some of my mates in the T & G, and they think I stand a good chance!”
“But that’s fantastic! So what’s the bad news?”
“One of the key selection meetings is when we’re supposed to be in Portugal. So I’m afraid you’ll have to ask your mum to cancel . . .”
My mum was furious. I was simply resigned. It was so late in the game that we lost all the money we’d put down.
In many ways this constituency was exactly what Tony had been hoping for, which was how I came to spend the night of my twenty-eighth birthday in the Middlesbrough Travel Lodge while Tony went to a meeting. I can remember ringing my mum from this miserable hotel room on my rather miserable birthday and her saying, “I don’t know why you married that Tony Blair. It’s just ridiculous.”
Around ten o’clock he was back at the hotel looking hangdog and shamefaced. There was no point staying in Middlesbrough any longer, he said. Another candidate — who duly became the MP — had sewn it all up long before. I have to say it came as a great relief. Middlesbrough had singularly failed to inspire me. Tony was determined not to be downhearted, displaying a character trait that would stand him in good stead. As the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers song has it, “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”
During Tony’s Beaconsfield campaign, I had got to know the regional secretary of the Labour Party quite well. He had seen for himself that I was at home canvassing and generally holding forth, and one day in the early spring of 1983 he suggested I drop in and see him. He had some news, he said, that I might be interested in.
“There may be a seat going,” he said when I arrived. “They’re looking for a woman candidate, so I was wondering if you’d be interested.” I never found out why they wanted a woman particularly. It was a safe Tory seat, so perhaps they thought they needed to do something different to generate publicity. “Thanet,” he continued, naming the district. It rang a vague bell. Thanet, I hazily recalled, was near Southend, and I knew from the courts that Southend wasn’t that far from Hackney.
“Well, why not?” I said. “After all, it’s only round the corner.” He gave me a slightly puzzled look.
The more the regional secretary told me, the more I liked the sound of it. The sitting MP was a chap called Billy Rees-Davies, QC, a notorious old criminal lawyer who’d got silk, it was thought, solely because he was an MP. He had only one arm and used to claim that he’d lost the other during enemy action, making himself out to be some sort of war hero, though some said that the circumstances were more dubious.
Rees-Davies was a well-known rogue, one of those barristers who are more famous for the anecdotes about them than anything else. He was a character with a capital C, so I thought, Well, at least you can have a bit of fun with an opponent like that.
As I got into my car to go home, I had a thought. “I suppose I had better go to some ward meetings and that kind of thing,” I said to the regional secretary.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t bother with any of that. Just go for the final selection. We’ll get you a nomination, and you can take it from there.”
Great!
It was only the night before the selection meeting, when I looked up my route on the map, that it dawned on me what a terrible mistake I had made.
Thanet was nowhere near Southend, except possibly as the seagull flies. It was the other side of the Thames, at the far end of Kent — more than a hundred miles away. (This was before the M2 was opened.) During the long drive down, crawling through southeast London, I prayed that I wouldn’t be selected.
Fat chance. The constituency party consisted of about three men and a dog. I was the only woman, and the moment I went in, I could tell by their smiles that they really did want a woman candidate and they were going to select me. Sure enough, they did.
I drove back feeling very odd. Marc and Bina had just had their first baby, so I met Tony at the hospital.
“Guess what?” I said. “I’ve become a candidate.”
On one level it was quite a coup. Barristers were not flavor of the month in the Labour Party. At least I was a working-class barrister, which is slightly better than a public-school barrister, and for once being a woman had worked in my favor.
Tony smiled, a bit wanly I thought. He obviously had mixed feelings. Yes, I had a seat to fight — we’d had so many setbacks that we didn’t actually think it would happen — but it wasn’t that lucky because it was perfectly obvious that Billy Rees-Davies would get straight back in.
I’d rather been looking forward to sparring with him — it was the one bright spot on the horizon — but in the end even that was denied me. The former Thanet West and Thanet East constituencies were changed to north and south to reflect the current demographic. The Tories took full advantage of that to chuck out Billy Rees-Davies, who even they knew had been a hopeless incompetent. My new opponent was named Roger Gale. To take on someone of his background — a former pirate radio DJ and regional television presenter — could have been amusing, but it wasn’t.
Thanet’s local organization made Beaconsfield seem a powerhouse in comparison. It had no resources and very few members. As a constituency, it was a strange mixture. The main center of population was Margate, and a lot of it was seaside land, full of old people who’d retired there, most of whom were too proud to be Labour. It was a sign of respectability to put a blue Tory sticker in the window.
Even my agent and the councillors were in their sixties and seventies. The few young people around were basically Trots who’d done their usual infiltrating — not that Thanet was exactly a prime target for the radical left.
The local Labour Party was not without ambition, however, and when my dad said he could probably get Tony Benn, the standard bearer of the old left of the Labour Party and a former cabinet minister, to come up and speak, the members were delighted. Of course my dad came along, too. The result was a very strange meeting. I was definitely the most conservative of the three.
For my little speech of introduction, I raised a few smiles when I said how proud I was to be on the platform with these two Tonys, who had been such a great influence on me and the Labour Party. “I give you Tony Booth and Tony Benn!”
The third Tony — my Tony — was there as well, though very much behind the scenes. We had offered to drive Tony Benn down in our car, and on the way back he had really opened up. The three of us had talked nonstop, both politics and, more surprisingly, religion — about liberation theology and the influence of Christianity on socialism. We ended up at his house in Notting Hill still talking, where we met his wife, Caroline, a lovely woman. We all got on very well, and I had the feeling that Tony Benn thought my Tony was an okay guy, although politically, of course, they were on different sides of the debate.
The Thanet Labour Party was delighted with the meeting. It got more publicity than it had had in years, probably ever. Whether it won us any votes is less certain. There was a council election at the same time, however, so it was important.
My husband was supportive right from the beginning. On our way back from France the previous Easter, before the election had even been announced, we had stopped in Margate to have lunch with my agent to talk about the forthcoming campaign. My feelings were a mixture of excitement and dread. The Conservatives were on a high, while the Labour Party was tearing itself apart.
After lunch, it was time for business.
“Tony,” he said, “Cherie and I need to talk things over, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping my wife with the washing up?” Tony ambled off to the kitchen.
My agent’s wife was nice enough, but very much the supportive spouse. The conversation during lunch had drifted here and there — the pleasures of the seaside and her belief that seagulls are vermin. While they were washing up, Tony later reported, she said, “So tell me, Tony, are you interested in politics, or are you just doing this for Cherie’s sake?”
For him, this was the nadir.