Chapter 20
Over the last few days of the campaign, Tony had been getting memos from the Cabinet office at Number 10, setting out how things actually worked. From the most basic (there was no direct dialing, for example; all calls went through the switchboard, which, we were told, was always known as “switch”), through to the “cast list”: who people were, what they did, whom they answered to — from the Cabinet secretary to messengers and “garden girls” (as, to my horror, the women who provided secretarial help were known). Ultimately, of course, they all answered to the Prime Minister, and now that was Tony.
Nothing can describe my mixture of emotions as the door closed behind me: not only awe in the historical sense — the knowledge that everyone from William Pitt to Winston Churchill had been there — but anxiety — that their baton, heavy with responsibility, had now been passed to Tony. There was also an undercurrent of unease. I felt like the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca must have when she arrived at Manderley for the first time. As the new Mrs. de Winter, she might have been the mistress of the house on paper, but in reality she was utterly powerless, because she had no idea what she was up against.
As we walked down the corridor lined with staff, I was reminded of the scene from the Hitchcock film of du Maurier’s novel: the old house, the servants lined up to greet their gawky, unsophisticated new mistress. And just as at Manderley, where the staff had all previously worked for Rebecca, these people now clapping us in were civil servants who’d been working for a Tory government for years and years, and there must certainly have been some among them who were hoping that our tenure would be short. None of our own people were there. It really felt like walking into the lion’s den. Later I realized that it was just as unsettling for them having to deal with us. While Sir Robin Butler, the head of the Civil Service, and Alex Allan, the principal private secretary to the Prime Minister, talked to Tony privately, the kids and I hung round in the corridor outside making faces at each other. After only a few minutes Tony emerged, raised his eyebrows, and took my hand in his. We were off to inspect the accommodations.
We’d been sent the ground plans several months before as part of the standard preelection contact between the Civil Service and the opposition, so to some degree I knew what to expect, though I have always found architects’ plans hard to visualize. Then, a few weeks previously, Jonathan had been allowed in to take a look. From what he’d seen, he thought the Number 10 flat would be too small for us, and although Number 11 — traditionally the domain of the Chancellor of the Exchequer — was definitely in need of a lick of paint, it was a much better place for a family. Our first stop, because it was nearer, was Number 10, so recently vacated by the Majors. Jonathan was right. Two bedrooms were a reasonable size, but the other two were very small. The five of us might just have squeezed in, but what about when my mum came to stay? Or Ros, come to that, without whom I could not function? Norma Major had redone the kitchen and knocked two rooms into one, but it, too, was a bit cramped, not helped by having such low ceilings.
The nicest thing about the flat was the bottle of champagne left there for us by the Majors, with a note saying, “Good luck. It’s a great job. Enjoy it.” A generous gesture and one I wouldn’t forget.
Number 11 was the only real option, we decided. It was on three floors, with rooms set round a central staircase. It turned out to be a whole house minus the ground floor, and although the shell was original, it had been gutted and totally rebuilt in the 1960s.
From the outside, Downing Street looks like a sedate Georgian terrace. The frontage, certainly, dates from the seventeenth century, but behind it everything opens out in a way one would never expect. Once inside, the only sign that these were originally individual residences are the multiple staircases. In 1735 the various individual buildings were connected by long corridors by the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Directly beneath the grand first-floor reception rooms, overlooking the garden and Horse Guards Parade, are the equally grand Cabinet room and the Prime Minister’s private office. Directly above the grand reception rooms are the distinctly ungrand rooms that make up the Number 10 flat.
The black-and-white-marble-floored entrance hall that lies immediately behind the front door is the domain of the custodians, as the doorkeepers are known, and all visitors to Downing Street enter this way before being escorted to their eventual destinations. Go straight ahead, and at the end of a long corridor, you arrive at the Cabinet room and the offices of the Prime Minister and his staff. Turn left, and you are in Number 11, the offices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, beyond that, the press office in Number 12. (What is known as the Number 11 flat actually extends above Number 12.)
We were introduced to this labyrinth of staircases and passages by Carol Allan, the house manager, and John Holroyd, in charge of protocol. They had both been at Downing Street a long time and knew the building well. I told them that I hadn’t made up my mind about what we were going to do. Above all, I said, we didn’t want to disrupt the children too much, and we certainly didn’t want to move their schools. Nicky was in his last term at St. Joan of Arc, so in the back of my mind I was thinking that we would possibly stay in Richmond Crescent at least till the end of term, and maybe we’d move in over the summer.
Apart from the hall, Number 11 had plenty of light, and the rooms were all high ceilinged and generally spacious. As we walked round, I realized that it was a good deal bigger than Richmond Crescent. Yes, it was very old-fashioned — it had last been done up many years before with an unattractive mustard-colored carpet and flocked wallpaper — but we’d already been told it could be redecorated. The worst thing was the haze of cigar smoke that clung to everything. It was like going into a jazz club on a Sunday morning before the cleaners arrived — an all-too-enduring legacy of John Major’s last Chancellor.
The children, however, were entranced. They’d already discovered a secret spiral staircase that led directly down to the garden. And what a garden! “It’s as big as the park,” I overheard an excited Kathryn telling a friend later. The bedrooms had already been divvied up. Shrieks of “Bags, I have this one!” rang out from upstairs. Euan had gone for one with an enormous desk, only to discover later that once the desk had been removed, the room itself was smaller than his younger brother’s. The problem with the bedrooms was the lack of storage, beyond a series of heavy mahogany wardrobes that smelled of mothballs and cedar. My heart sank at the sight of the kitchen. It might have been state-of-the-art in the sixties, but that was then. The sink had ancient faucets you could barely get a kettle under, and everything was incredibly utilitarian and bleak, with a beat-up pine table in the middle.
Then every so often it would hit me: what was I thinking of, complaining about sinks, when our little family was about to embark on an extraordinary voyage? In some ways I was too overwhelmed to take it all in, and I needed the children’s excitement to bring home what had really happened and where we were. Tony was Prime Minister! This was Downing Street! Who cared about faucets!
“You’ve given me food for thought,” I told Carol as we made our way down the staircase outside the front door of the flat on the first floor.
“When you know what you want to do, just give me a call,” she said. The trouble was that I had no idea what I wanted to do. Tony was anxious to keep everything the same as it was, for both him and the kids. It was barely two years since we’d got Richmond Crescent as we wanted it. Even the idea of going through all that again made my heart sink. And yet I knew that the most important thing was for us all to be together as a family, as we had always been. And although it would involve a lot of work, Number 11 had an amazing amount of space. But it had to be a family decision, and that meant the kids’ opinions were vitally important.
By the time we got down from our tour, friends and family were milling around the state dining room, already making inroads into the buffet lunch that had been laid on. The kids, faced with this huge table of food, had gone completely wild. The hubbub was tremendous — adults, children, everyone buzzing — and admonishments to calm down were totally disregarded. The whole building seemed to be ringing with shrieks and laughter, and I remember wondering whether it had ever seen such a day in its entire history.
Outside, the sun continued to shine, and while the children careered around, the bemused and slightly shell-shocked grown-ups sat in the garden, took photographs, and generally marveled at where we were and what had happened. I’d be chatting normally, then suddenly catch someone’s eye, and we would both burst into fits of spontaneous laughter. I felt like punching the sky! He had done it! My husband had done it!
Around five it was time to go. After all the pumping of adrenaline and excitement, we had run out of steam, and we simply went home. It was surreal. One moment we were sitting on the terrace outside the Cabinet room at Number 10, and the next moment I was in the kitchen at Richmond Crescent, poking round in the fridge, wondering what to do about supper.
Lying in bed later that night, trying to get to sleep, I thought back over our day: so many extraordinary moments I was determined not to forget. As we’d come out of the audience with the Queen, I’d asked Tony what had happened. “I mean, did you really have to kiss hands?”
“Not exactly,” he said. Before he went in, the Lord Chamberlain had explained that actual kissing wasn’t required. It was more like “a brushing of lips over her hand.” Next thing, Tony was ushered into her presence. Seeing the outstretched hand, he began to move forward, then somehow — feeling both bemused and nervous — he tripped over the edge of the carpet and ended up falling on top of the hand with an ardor that neither he nor Her Majesty was anticipating.
Her composure was quite unruffled, he said, and with a reassuring smile, she told him that he was her tenth Prime Minister and that her first, Winston Churchill, had been in office before Tony was even born.
“Don’t worry,” I told him, as we settled into the car on our way to Downing Street. “I know that her tenth Prime Minister is going to be as good as the first, even if his hand-kissing technique could do with brushing up.”
Though exhausted, we slept not much better than we had the night before. Our bedroom was on the first floor, the bed between the two front windows, and the nonstop racket in the street — police needing to chat and talk every two hours when they changed shifts — made sleep practically impossible. As I lay there, staring at the ceiling, it became obvious, as it hadn’t been before, that staying in our old house wasn’t viable if we were to have any privacy at all. Tony couldn’t possibly run the country from here, and we didn’t want to be separated, which meant that we would all have to move into Downing Street. The security people had made it clear that if we stayed in Richmond Crescent, it would be turned into something resembling a detention center. The glass in all the windows had already been changed, and special curtains had been put up. The road itself was cordoned off with bollards at both ends. It was unfair to expect our neighbors to put up with this. They hadn’t asked for any of it.
At around six o’clock a truck arrived, and some men began to dismantle the scaffolding erected for the press. As I lay there, listening to the clanging and banging outside, I thought about the logistics of it all. The best time to do the move, I decided, would be half term, which was in about three weeks.
I can’t remember now exactly what time the bell went off, sometime around eight-thirty. Ros was two floors up, still asleep — officially she was off-duty on weekends — and as nobody else was getting it, I pressed the intercom.
“Flower delivery for you, Mrs. Blair.” It was one of the policemen.
“Can’t you just put them inside the door?”
“ ’Fraid not. I’m here on my own.”
I padded down to the front door and opened it, yawning, hair like a bird’s nest, and bleary-eyed.
What awaited me outside was more than a nice bouquet from the governing body of St. Joan of Arc. If the marketing people wanted me to be like the woman in the street, they couldn’t have planned it better. The photographer outside my door clicked away, and soon every tabloid editor in the world knew exactly what picture would go on the front page that Sunday. No doubt the photographer made a fortune.
As I shut the door, I remember leaning my forehead against the back of it, my eyes closed, thinking, Oh, my God, Tony will kill me. I could just hear him saying, “How could you be so stupid as to go down in your nightdress without even putting on a dressing gown?” In fact, he didn’t. He had more pressing matters to attend to. Nevertheless, despite all the effort over the past weeks to turn me into a suitable consort for the Prime Minister, I ended up looking like the madwoman from the attic. (I did object to how my nightdress was mocked, however. It was a perfectly respectable gray cotton nightie — all natural fibers, not remotely cheap and nasty as the press claimed.)
Over breakfast I told the kids how I felt. The business with the flowers had put the final nail in the coffin of any idea I’d clung to of staying where we were. We couldn’t. The press would be there the whole time; the entire neighborhood would be disrupted. I told them that I thought we should probably move to Downing Street, and I was wondering about half term.
“Why wait till then?” they chorused. “We’ve chosen our bedrooms, so why don’t we just move in now?” They were very firm. If we did it on Monday, the May bank holiday, they’d be back in school by Tuesday.
I called Carol Allan. She would meet me at Number 10 in an hour, she said. With Nicky and Kathryn safely off to their music lessons, Ros and I left for Downing Street to play musical chairs. The Civil Service considers Number 10 and Number 11 government property and didn’t want us to bring our own furniture into the building. This presented problems. The two sofas in the former Chancellor’s sitting room were very down-at-heel, and nothing had been touched for years. Knowing that Gordon wasn’t going to be using the Majors’ flat, I felt quite comfortable about taking what we needed from there. I arranged for a sideboard, some lamps, and two sofas to be brought over, though they were a bit too small. Kathryn inherited the twin beds from the Majors’ spare room, complete with Laura Ashley sprigged bedcovers. I wanted each of the kids to have two beds so that friends could stay, and it turned out there were a couple in storage that we could have. The same with desks and wardrobes.
The kitchen cupboards had less to offer in the way of equipment than a holiday cottage. In the short term Ros and I could bring things over from Richmond Crescent. I had not even begun to think about what was going to happen to everything there.
Tony spent the rest of the weekend closeted with Jonathan and Alastair, working out his Cabinet appointments. I tried to make sense of how I was going to move the whole caboodle in on Monday. Carol Allan agreed that they would open the windows and fumigate the rooms before we came in, so that was a start. There was no time to organize a moving van, not that we really needed one; all we were taking was our personal possessions, clothes, the kids’ toys, and general bits and pieces, which all went in one of the regular Number 10 vans — what they call a comms wagon, which is used to transport secure telecommunications equipment for the Prime Minister when he’s traveling. With the help of Ros, her mum, and her brother, we managed to accomplish all that on Monday morning. John Holroyd came in with a hammer and helped the kids put some of their posters and pictures on the wall, so it was quite sweet. But Number 11 was not set up for a family; that would take several years.
There was one near disaster. Kathryn and her friend Bella Mostyn-Williams, having decided that her wardrobe was exactly like the one in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, climbed in looking for adventure Narnia-style. An almighty shudder echoed through the building as the whole vast edifice crashed to the ground, with them within. Fortunately neither girl was injured, but if it hadn’t been clear before, it was now: this was no way to furnish a kid’s room.
That Monday evening Bill and Katy Blair came round bearing their usual gift of Chinese takeout. Over the following ten years, they never appeared without it. The next day being Tony’s forty-fourth birthday, we squashed round that terrible table and raised our glasses to him and to the first night in our new home. And, incredibly, it was already beginning to feel like ours. The party had given us a framed poster, and the kids had stuck it up in pride of place beside the sink: “New Labour. Britain just got better.” And it was true — we felt it in the streets, in the smiles of the people, in the air of jauntiness. It was as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from everyone’s shoulders.
The following morning, a huge birthday cake arrived courtesy of the Mirror, and somebody sent an even more enormous bouquet of red roses, about 350 of them, one for every Labour MP.
I didn’t see them delivered, as for me it was business as usual, this time in the Court of Appeal. It was a big case about a European Union measure that protects employees when their companies are bought out. The reporters’ bench was unusually full. When I stood up to open the case, I remarked how gratifying it was to see so much press interest in the technicalities of the Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment Regulations. Some of the reporters were there for the right reasons — it was an important case in terms of industrial relations. But most were political reporters, all wanting to see what I would do. (They lasted about fifteen minutes.)
Little did I know as I stood there discussing the finer points of employment law that a bombshell awaited me when I got back to Downing Street.
At the end of 1996, when the move to Number 10 became a probability rather than a possibility, the accountant had suggested that I undertake an income and expenditure exercise, such as you might do when applying for a mortgage. The results weren’t exactly encouraging. Whereas Tony’s income would go up, mine would go down. I didn’t know exactly how being the Prime Minister’s wife would affect the number of cases I could take, but it would certainly be lower. And with the official duties I’d have to carry out, I knew I’d have less time to devote to my career.
We’d been told that living in Downing Street would be treated as payment in kind and would, therefore, be taxed. Yet we still had a big mortgage to pay on Richmond Crescent, plus the loan I’d taken out for the refurbishment. I didn’t want to give up our home. I had no idea how long Tony would be Prime Minister, so I needed to make sure that we had a home to return to if Labour lost the next election. On the plus side, I knew that MPs and ministers were about to get a 26 percent salary raise, which Parliament had approved a few months earlier and which was due to take effect following the 1997 election. With that increase, I decided, we could probably manage.
Then Gordon threw a wrench in the works.
At the first Cabinet meeting of the new Labour government, the new Chancellor announced that he was not going to take the salary increase, and he put pressure on the others not to accept it either. Tony told me as soon as he got back to the flat. I couldn’t believe it; all my calculations had been based on the increase. This wasn’t an optional perk: Parliament had endorsed it. Ministers had been specifically mentioned: “We believe that additional recognition of the job weight of the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers is long overdue.” As the Leader of the Opposition, William Hague, did take his increase, this meant that Tony was now earning less than Hague.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table at Number 10, putting my head in my hands, and staring at the now completely redundant financial breakdown, as Tony tried to calm me down. But I wouldn’t be calmed down: How dare Gordon do that? What did he know about financial commitments? He was a bachelor living on his own in a flat with a small mortgage. Tony admitted it was a problem, but every problem, he said, has a solution — I just had to find one. He wanted to get on with the business of governing.
Despite my reluctance, it seemed like the obvious solution was to rent out the house in Richmond Crescent to cover the mortgage. But it wasn’t that simple. First, the advice was that this should be done through the Foreign Office. As I would later discover when we needed a new nanny, we could no longer go through the Northern Echo or Lady. From now on, we could use Civil Service–vetted agencies only. It was a security issue.
“Your problem,” the Foreign Office official explained, “is that the people we deal with don’t want to live in Islington. They want to live in Kensington or Knightsbridge.” Surely, I thought, there might be a junior official who wouldn’t mind slumming it in our neighborhood. The Foreign Office came to have a look.
“If you’re going to rent out this house, it’ll have to be completely redecorated, because it’s not suitable for the sort of families it would be suitable for.” I was entering the world of doublespeak.
Okay, I decided, we’d rent it privately. “Forget it,” said Alastair. When the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont had rented out his house, the tenant had been revealed as some sort of Miss Whiplash — manna from heaven for the tabloids.
“So what do we do?” I asked him. “We can’t afford to go on paying the mortgage. It’s as simple as that.”
“Why don’t you have a word with Michael,” he suggested.
Michael Levy was the Labour Party’s fund-raiser in chief, and also a friend and a successful businessman. If anyone would know what to do, he would.
Michael had been very good to us during the run-up to the election, letting the kids use the swimming pool at his house in north London, just to give them a break from Richmond Crescent.
“Sell,” he said. No other options? “No. Sell.”
We put it on the market, got an offer in fairly quickly, and accepted it. I didn’t want to leave our home, and I worried about losing our footing on the property ladder. After the sale of the house, we had £200,000 left, so I suggested putting the money into another, smaller property. No. As Prime Minister, Tony was not allowed to have any investments, and if we bought a house without living in it, this would be classed as an investment. We were obliged to put the money into a blind trust, with me as the sole beneficiary.
The one bright spot on the housing front was Chequers. When Tony first became Leader of the Opposition, I remember Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife, coming up to me at some do and saying, “I don’t envy you much, but I do envy you Chequers.” As the wife of a Cabinet minister in the last Labour government, she had been there. With that kind of recommendation, I couldn’t wait to see it.
The Friday of our first visit, the auguries did not look good. The curator whom Mrs. Thatcher had chosen to run Chequers had been a career naval officer — bizarrely, Chequers is officially considered a ship and is staffed by naval and air force personnel — and we’d heard that she had no experience with children. Sadly, she had taken over from her predecessor just as Mrs. Thatcher was ousted, and Mrs. Thatcher’s successors, the Majors, hardly ever went there. When they did, they found things rather more regimented than they were used to. Meals had to be at regular times, and the curator believed in staying up until the Majors went to bed, which they found less than relaxing. It didn’t sound to me like the kind of system that would go down too well with our kids, and I wondered how she would cope with having children running round the place, let alone going a bit wild.
John Holroyd did his best to allay my fears. “We very much want you to use Chequers,” he said. “It hasn’t been used recently as much as one would hope, so staff morale has gone down as a result, and I do assure you, they’re all looking forward enormously to your coming. While it’s true that the curator isn’t used to having children around, there is no reason to think they won’t charm her as they are already charming everyone here. Unfortunately,” he continued, “she won’t be able to welcome you herself this weekend, as she’s injured her back.” (In fact, the injury was serious enough that she never returned.)
The moment we arrived, driving up through the Victory Gate, with this historic Tudor pile standing right ahead of us, I couldn’t believe it. We left the children outside kicking a soccer ball, relishing the acres and acres of space, while Linda, the housekeeper, showed us around: all ancient paneling, gorgeous oil paintings, ornate carvings, mullioned windows, and rooms big enough to run races in.
As we went back to the children, Tony began shaking his head. “We can’t possibly bring the kids into this place,” he said. “They’ll wreck it.” From outside we heard the sounds of squabbling and decided they needed to walk off the excess adrenaline. Grass led away from all sides of the house, apart from the front, into woodland — wonderful and unsettling at the same time. By now the kids were really playing up, and Tony began to raise his voice, shouting at them to “just behave!” Suddenly he looked round and saw that we were being followed by the protection officers. And he went stiff with frustration and bewilderment.
“I don’t believe it,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t even yell at my own kids, because the police will hear.” Never again would Tony be able to walk anywhere without being followed, albeit at a discreet distance.
By the end of the weekend, it was obvious to us that Chequers was a good place to be. There was an indoor swimming pool. Did we want to use it? Under Mrs. Thatcher it had been drained because she didn’t swim. The Majors had used it, and in fact Norma had learned to swim there, but because they hardly ever went, the heating had been turned off. Our answer was a resounding yes.
The pool had been presented to Chequers by Walter Annenberg, the American Ambassador to Britain, in memory of Richard Nixon’s visit in October 1970. It’s built like an orangery, with a glass roof and glass sides that open completely in the summer. But because it’s basically an indoor pool, you can swim there all year round. As far as the kids were concerned, it was complete heaven.
For ten years Chequers became our refuge. Although it might look like a stately home, inside the atmosphere is far more comfortable and domesticated than the outside view suggests. We would all breathe a huge sigh of relief when, on a Friday evening, the Jaguar turned through the gate into the east courtyard. Linda or Ann, her successor, would come out to greet us, and the children would run in, throw off their coats, and rush off to their bedrooms, or to see the rabbits, or to search the kitchen for treats they could scrounge.
Chequers was the one place where Tony could be just a dad and kick a ball round with his children like any other father. It was an illusion, of course. As we were quickly learning, police and security people were always round, but at least at Chequers, we didn’t see them. At least there, we had the space to lead a normal life.