Chapter 17
Back in Richmond Crescent, life continued much as usual, except that now Daddy didn’t take the kids to school in the morning. All three were still in school in Highbury, though this would be Euan’s last year. The question was, where would he go next?
Planning your children’s education is always difficult, but after factoring in all the Blair imponderables, it became a nightmare. Wherever Euan went, he would start a new school in the autumn of 1995, and if the Major government decided to follow the normal pattern, the election could be in May 1996. I had to be practical. If the unimaginable did happen and we found ourselves in Downing Street in 1996 or 1997, that would be upheaval enough for our kids. Continuity would be crucial, and changing schools would not be an option. Also, with Nicky only two years behind Euan, we didn’t want them going to different schools. In the end we opted for the London Oratory School in west London, which was a reasonable journey from both Richmond Crescent and Westminster.
When Tony told Alastair, he went ballistic. It would be disastrous for Tony’s reputation, he said. He had a duty to send his children to a neighborhood school, not to a school on the other side of London, operating independently of the local education system. The fact that the Oratory was funded by the state and nonselective in terms of ability did not impress him. The fact that it was a faith school was enough to put him off. Alastair famously “doesn’t do” religion, so he never understood why it mattered to me that my children received a Catholic education. Catholic schools continued to have religious assemblies, and the children observed the feast days, things that no longer happened in nonreligious schools. This sort of thing wasn’t important only to me; it was important to Tony as well. Although he wasn’t Catholic, he had been coming to Mass with us since the children were little. At St. Joan of Arc, as at most Catholic churches up and down the country, the Sunday morning Mass was family Mass: a genuinely warm and friendly affair, if a little chaotic. It was a chance for the children and their parents to worship and socialize together. In fact, Tony used to take Communion with the kids on a regular basis. He was a member of our church community; few, if any, in the congregation knew he wasn’t Catholic. By this time Euan and Nicky had made their first Holy Communion. It would have been very odd for Euan to go to a non-Catholic school after being at a Catholic primary.
I don’t know if Alastair thought this was me flexing my muscles because of the disagreement over Carole. Frankly, I think it unlikely. I might have been the official Catholic in our family, and Tony might have been dissuaded from brandishing his religious beliefs in public, but this was not politics, this was private and nonnegotiable, and Tony told Alastair so in no uncertain terms. Alastair gave him dire warnings, saying, “You will live to regret this,” but the truth is, we never did. It was the right thing for our family.
Of course the story leaked, and on December 1, 1994, it was front-page news in the Daily Mail. But Tony stuck to his guns. The London Oratory was not a fee-paying school. It was not selective. It was still funded by the state, if not the local education authority. His children’s education was not a political football.
There was a broader point, too. Tony wanted to bring a good standard of education to everyone, whatever their religion or lack of religion. That was another of his goals: to show people that they could be aspirational yet at the same time care about what happened to others. Above all, he wanted to jettison the idea that once people did better in life, the Labour Party was no longer their natural home.
When John Smith took over as leader from Neil Kinnock in 1992, the party paid £70,000 for his apartment to be redecorated, on the grounds that he needed somewhere suitable for official entertaining. Now that Tony was Leader of the Opposition, someone from the party came to look over our house in Richmond Crescent and, taking a dim view of the holes in the carpet, suggested we should use John Smith’s flat.
“If I’m having to entertain,” I said, “I am not going to entertain in somebody else’s house. It has to be done in ours.” As for bringing Richmond Crescent up to scratch, neither of us felt we could take any more money from the party, which only two years previously had spent so much doing up John Smith’s place.
The moment we began to look beneath the surface, it was apparent that a face-lift would not be sufficient. My dad was always complaining that he got ill every time he stayed in our spare room in the basement, that it was damp and unhealthy. It turned out he was right. The whole of the downstairs had to be damp-proofed and replastered, which involved borrowing £30,000 from the bank. Tony’s attitude toward money has always been “I just want to do what’s right, and somehow or other we’ll sort it out.” Although I had long before accepted that I was the major breadwinner, it sometimes rankled that he would get the credit for maintaining the moral high ground while the responsibility of funding an increased mortgage, as in this case, would fall on me. It didn’t strike me as odd, however. It was how things had been when I was growing up. My grandma was always in charge of the family finances. Grandad would hand over most of his pay, and my mum would hand over half of hers.
When I moved to Michael Beloff’s chambers in Gray’s Inn Square in 1991, Leslie Page, the chief clerk, told me that chambers’ “game plan” was that within the next five years, I would take silk. As we were now coming up on 1995, it was time to think seriously about what I should do.
Acceptance as a Queen’s Counsel, or silk, was far from automatic. At that time, the view of the senior judges was what ultimately decided the matter, so if a junior barrister was thinking of applying, it was a good idea to talk to a senior member of the Bench to see what he or she thought.
Becoming a Queen’s Counsel wasn’t guaranteed to give a junior a higher income. There was even a risk he or she would see a drop. Someone with a good junior practice could earn well in excess of a silk whose practice was limited. In those days silks couldn’t work without a junior. Not only could they not appear in court without a junior supporting them, but they could no longer do pleadings or draft court documents. And it was often the case that the junior brought in the work in the first place. If a junior didn’t like a silk, he or she was in trouble.
By 1995, however, such rules were already bending because of murmurings concerning restrictive practices, and by the end of the nineties, they were largely gone. Even so, after I made silk, I rarely did things on my own, simply because the economics were better for the client. A junior was cheaper than I was and could easily do the background stuff. Why pay my hourly rate for this work? Roughly speaking, a silk is paid to shape the case and provide the eventual advocacy. Once in court, the junior is there to assist the silk, to make sure he or she covers all the points and generally to act as the silk’s assistant. Whereas the junior will help the silk draft the written argument that is filed with the court, the silk presents the oral argument. When a trial involves examining witnesses, the silk might even let the junior do some of the minor witness evidence. In my situation, however, most of the cases I dealt with didn’t involve witnesses, because they were about legal points, so my work mainly involved arguing the point of law.
I had moved chambers in order to give my practice a boost, and the move had certainly been effective. I had stopped doing the routine stuff and was doing more High Court work, specifically judicial review cases, which were both interesting and — because they often involved challenging government decisions — quite political and high profile. As a consequence, they brought me to the attention of the High Court judges, the people who ultimately decide who gets silk and who doesn’t.
A classic example of public law was the poll tax. Officially known as the community charge, it had been brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1989 and levied on every citizen. The tax was unrelated to an individual’s wealth or ability to pay and so was perceived as being grossly unfair by the majority of the population.
People sometimes ask me how I deal with cases involving a law I don’t particularly like. While I didn’t think the poll tax was a good idea politically, I also believed that as Parliament had passed that bill, people had to pay the tax. That is, you can change the law, but you don’t disobey the law. It’s the old question that all law students have to decide: do you have an obligation to obey the law? For example, Gandhi and his followers, who flagrantly disobeyed the law, accepted that as a consequence, they would be sent to prison.
A friendly solicitor in Manchester brought me a series of interesting cases against a body called ICSTIS, set up to monitor child chat lines in order to prevent children from running up huge phone bills that their parents would have to pay. Some of these lines turned out to be sex lines, so I found myself defending the existence of sex lines that were being closed down by ICSTIS. It would start with a nice intellectual argument, but then the judge would say, “Well, let’s see some of these transcripts,” and I’d have to read out what people were actually saying on the sex lines. And as I was standing there, reading out this stuff, I could see my case disappearing down the plughole. The judge, being only human, would think, I don’t care how clever this legal argument is; those lines must stay closed. And that’s what usually happened. Often in such instances, I knew I was not going to win. Good as the intellectual case might be, it was morally indefensible.
The reason I took on these cases — and others that I didn’t necessarily approve of — was the cab-rank rule. It arose in the eighteenth century, when John Wilkes and others like him were being tried for sedition and couldn’t find lawyers to represent them, because the lawyers were frightened of being punished by the government. If the legal system was to work properly, it was reckoned, the defendants had a right to be represented. According to the cab-rank rule, it is a matter of professional misconduct to turn down a case if you are available and if you have been offered a reasonable fee.
Some barristers say, “I will not represent rapists” or “I won’t do this or that.” To me, the advantage of the cab-rank rule is that no one can claim that I picked a particular case because I espouse the cause. Of course, sometimes I do espouse the cause, and it could be argued that I am likely to make a better job of it. But that’s completely and utterly irrelevant.
Once Tony was Leader of the Opposition, it became even more important that I stick to this rule. I had to ensure that I remained totally untainted by politics, especially when my field was so bound up with governmental decisions.
It was through doing public law that I also started doing education law. In the 1990s a whole system of special-needs education was starting up, responding to children with physical, mental, or behavioral difficulties. Because I was experienced in family law and was thought to be good with children, many of these cases came my way. In one case, we managed to get the court to overturn the local authority’s decision to move a girl out of her special school. This girl had cerebral palsy. There was nothing wrong with her brain; it was just her body that was damaged. I also did the first case concerning a dyslexic girl who sued her local authority for failing to diagnose her condition. The issue was whether the local authority was liable to a charge of negligence. In 2002 I wrote a book on the subject. As the field was so new, there wasn’t one that dealt with it.
Because education was a very new field in terms of the law, I argued before the highest courts in the land, which meant that my visibility was becoming much greater among the judges. I’d got to know several of them quite well, so I went to talk to some of them about applying for Queen’s Counsel. Their response was encouraging. My practice, they felt, would justify my taking silk, and they suggested that it would be better to apply while there was still a Tory government. If I waited until Labour was in power, it would be harder to avoid allegations of favoritism.
I applied in 1995 — one of only six women who took silk that year. By sheer chance, on the day it was announced, Tony and I had been invited to Windsor Castle. Traditionally the Leader of the Opposition stays the night, but that year — much to our relief — this was impossible because of ongoing repairs following a serious fire in 1992. It wasn’t that we had anything against staying, but the following day was Easter, and we wanted to set off early for the constituency.
So it was that on the day it was announced that “Her Majesty is pleased to have appointed . . . Cherie Booth as her Counsel,” I had dinner with the Queen. It wasn’t the first time I had met her. New MPs are always invited to Buckingham Palace with their spouses, and at that first meeting I remember being struck dumb, not knowing what to say and getting terribly confused as to how to curtsy. When I was little, I had been taught to curtsy in ballet class, but a ballet curtsy seemed a bit over-the-top for this particular occasion, so I managed a vague kind of bob. (The accusation that I refused to curtsy, either then or later, is a complete load of rubbish, though now I tend to bow. As a barrister, I bow all the time — lady barristers are not expected to curtsy — out of respect to the court and respect to the Crown, so that comes completely naturally.)
The ceremony where you actually take silk immediately follows the Easter bank holiday and takes place at the Palace of Westminster. This requires a trip to Ede & Ravenscroft to purchase a new silk gown and a full-bottom wig. Lady barristers traditionally wore long skirts for the ceremony, but since 1991 we had been allowed to wear the men’s costume of knickerbockers, which were much jollier, so I decided to go for them. When I tried them on, I was surprised at how ill fitting they were at the front, with so much loose material. A red-faced assistant had to explain to me why. In the end I got a pair specially made.
It was a real family celebration. My dad came down, and my mum, Lyndsey, and all three of my children were there. Tony couldn’t be there for the whole ceremony, as he was needed in the House of Commons, but at about eleven o’clock he came over to Westminster Hall to watch the proceedings.
After a little celebration in chambers, we went over to the Lord Chief Justice’s court. There, in precedent order, we were presented to the Lord Chief Justice. By this time the kids were getting a bit restless and were rather bemused by all the bowing and scraping, not to mention their mum in this ridiculous outfit looking like a pantomime Prince Charming. My dad, meanwhile, was getting himself photographed by the waiting press: no show without Punch. Even so, I knew he was very pleased. I remember him saying, “Your grandma would have been so thrilled that you matched Rose Heilbron.” And it’s true; she would have been.
Finally it was party time. The car took us back to the house, and everyone — friends and family — turned up to celebrate. Later that evening we ended up at Tony’s brother Bill’s and had Chinese takeout. It was the end of a fantastic day: a very proud moment for me, a proud moment for my mum, and even the kids were marginally impressed. They were used to their dad being the Big Thing, but at least I got to dress up for my moment in the sun.
Around the time the London Oratory story first broke, I had a phone call from a very irate Fiona. Anji Hunter had told her that I thought Alastair had leaked the story. I had no idea where Anji had got that, I said. Certainly not from me, because it wasn’t the case. Fiona was clearly very upset and stressed, and it emerged that despite what I had promised her about not losing sight of family obligations, life in the Campbell-Millar household had gone rapidly downhill.
“He goes off in the morning, then when I’ve just about given up on him ever coming back, he reappears. And when he is here, he’s on the phone. Frankly, I could be an umbrella stand for all the notice he takes of me,” Fiona said. This sounded all too familiar. Tony was doing his best to stay involved, but his job was an endless series of obligations, morning, noon, and night. I thought, Join the club.
“Believe me, Fiona,” I said, “I know exactly how you feel.”
After this conversation the idea emerged that if she was more involved, things might improve on the home front. Perhaps, Tony suggested, I could do with some extra help? Fiona was a freelance reporter. She had started on the Daily Express, where her father had been a journalist. She sometimes did things for the in-house magazine for the House of Commons and had always been political.
Fiona is very attractive, with a shock of blond hair, and also strong-minded and determined. But she can be very unforgiving. At that time it’s fair to say I didn’t know her very well, but we were friendly, and I trusted her. The first thing she did in her new role was to get Philip Gould, the Labour Party’s poll adviser, to slip a few questions into some of his focus groups to find out what people thought of me. As she was friendly with Lindsay Nicholson, then editor of Prima, a women’s magazine, Fiona arranged for me to be a guest editor for the tenth-anniversary issue. Lindsay’s husband, John Merritt, had been a trainee reporter with Alastair, and they had become great friends. John had died of leukemia in 1993, leaving Lindsay with a three-year-old and pregnant with their second daughter — a terrible story. I took to Lindsay immediately — a really nice woman, a fantastically capable editor, and a good Catholic girl like me.
What had emerged from Philip’s focus groups was that I needed to project a softer image, to show that I was an ordinary mum, which I fundamentally was (though the idea that ordinary mums go round guest editing glossy magazines was another matter). At first I thought “guest editing” meant that I had physically to edit the magazine, but Lindsay remained very firmly in the driver’s seat. “My” issue of Prima would be built round my interests, she explained. On the lighter side, knitting emerged as the front-runner. I had been given my first knitting needles by Grandma when I was three. Tea cozies were my pièces de résistance and — I liked to think — much sought after as collector’s items. For this exercise, however, they wanted something that involved a pattern, so we went for a cable-knit sweater. (I didn’t actually knit it, though I would have enjoyed the challenge. There just wasn’t enough time.) Then there were my more serious interests: the abuse of women and children. I had recently been approached by Refuge, a charity for battered wives, and asked whether I would join its board. Until then the charity work I had done had been directly related to my work as a lawyer: giving free advice to the Child Poverty Action Group and the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law, and of course my Wednesday evening sessions in Tower Hamlets.
Veena, whose parents’ flat I had borrowed in Maida Vale, had by this time divorced her first husband and married a charismatic barrister called Gareth Williams, and there was talk of him becoming Attorney General or Solicitor General. It was Gareth who approached me about getting involved with the Justice for Children campaign of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Its aim was to get lawyers to raise funds for an NSPCC facility, which traced child-abuse rings and had specialist social workers who would support the kids through the court process. For a child, giving evidence in a criminal trial is always difficult and sometimes traumatic, and part of what we were looking for — in addition to raising funds — was a change in the way defense counsel cross-examined, because many barristers were still aggressive with even quite young witnesses.
Although it might appear self-defeating to bully a child with a jury present, if the child contradicts himself or herself, he or she is branded a liar, and the abuser gets off. We wanted to change that climate. The Tories had already started exploring whether we could make things easier for children, and after Labour came in, we did quite a lot to support victims in court, including battered women and rape victims, and to change the rules so that they could give evidence behind a screen. All that began with the Justice for Children campaign.
Prima also allowed me to build on a campaign by Refuge to raise its profile. I wrote an article about how I had become involved as a young lawyer and how important it was for me and for women in general.
Alas, Tony’s office was very dubious about the article. Why should I draw attention to myself? A woman brought in to look at the thorny issue of how I should present myself decided I was asking for trouble. “People are going to assume that the reason you got involved is that your father beat your mother.”
“But he didn’t,” I said. “And that is not why I am doing this.” (In fact, in all these years, nobody has once suggested that it was.) Thanks to Fiona fighting on my side, the office finally agreed, but they remained decidedly apprehensive, muttering under their breath about not needing the extra hassle. They didn’t get any hassle, and my getting involved in the campaign started a relationship with Refuge that continues to this day.
In this, as in so much else, having Fiona there to champion my cause made all the difference. Over those early years she kept me sane: not only in the obvious way — keeping the mail under control and running my schedule once we got into Downing Street — but most important in fighting for family life to be included in the thinking of Tony’s office, something she and I had a common interest in.
In September 1995 Euan duly started at the London Oratory School. On the first day of term, those mothers among us who could went with our sons on the subway. They were only eleven, and most of them had never traveled on the underground on their own. We left home at ten to seven, having arranged to meet up with Euan’s friend at Arsenal station. At Earls Court we changed onto the District Line. By now the carriage was filled with boys dressed in the same uniform, and they were chatting and joking with each other.
“Did you hear?” one boy said to his friend opposite.
“Hear what?”
“Tony Blair’s son’s going to be in our school today.”
Euan said nothing but nudged me, and I gave him a little smile.
From West Brompton station it’s about an eight-minute walk to the school, and that morning our route was lined with older students to mark out the way for the new pupils. As we walked down Seagrave Road, the atmosphere was jocular and lively. A happy start, I thought, to this new chapter in my son’s life. As we approached the school, there was a flurry of activity, and other mothers walking in front of me pulled their children to one side. Then I saw them: three photographers — paparazzi — shouting out my name and running toward us. It was a horrible feeling. It was as if the Red Sea had parted, and Euan and I had to walk up the middle, everyone turning to look and these guys running, their cameras held up against their faces. What could I do? If I tried to join the other mothers, it would end up with their children getting photographed as well, which would get me in even more trouble. I kept walking. By the time we got to the gate, Euan was close to tears, and while everybody else waited until all the new pupils had arrived, we were bundled in, then I was smuggled out another entrance. I got back on the underground feeling upset and angry — upset for my son, but furious with myself because I had failed to protect him.
Once back in chambers, I called Tony’s office, told them what had happened, and said that, in my view, it was a breach of the Press Complaints Code, a set of journalistic standards established by the media to govern how the news should be covered. It worked. After pressure from the office, no English newspaper printed the pictures, although the “story” was reported. I couldn’t believe it. This was an eleven-year-old boy who was going to be traveling every day through central London on his own. Did I really want him to be recognized? Would any mother? Two years later, when Nicky went to the Oratory, he refused point-blank to allow me to go with him on the first day, and who could blame him?