Chapter 21
The first official visitors we hosted at Downing Street were, appropriately enough, the Clintons. It was barely a month after Tony took office, and I remember everyone being very excited, because everyone wanted to meet Bill: the kids, the nanny, my sister, and my mother. For the benefit of the press, we greeted the most powerful political couple in the world outside on the front steps. I had a special outfit made by Ronit Zilkha: “nonthreatening” was the brief from the office. Heaven forbid that I should look like a career woman. The office was terrified that I might turn into Hillary Clinton.
The Downing Street administration also had concerns about Hillary, albeit on a more pragmatic level. She would need somewhere to “park” herself, they said. The Number 11 downstairs toilet was deemed unsuitable for the wife of the American President. Only the bathroom off Ros’s room met the standard, the former Chancellor’s guest room being the sole part of the flat that had been decorated in the past ten years.
At least by the time Hillary took a look round, Number 11 had improved noticeably in terms of the jazz-club haze. When I recounted to her my run-ins with Downing Street over the most modest improvements (such as built-in wardrobes for the kids and a new kitchen), she was amazed. In America, she told me, the incoming President’s wife had the choice of keeping the White House the way it was or redecorating. There was a charitable fund entirely devoted to its refurbishment, for which the First Lady would actively seek donations — and get them. When I suggested to the Cabinet secretary that we might do something similar to refurbish the state rooms in Downing Street or Chequers and save the taxpayers money, the answer was no.
Rather than some overly formal dinner in Downing Street, we decided to take the golden couple out to a restaurant — a far more personal way, Tony felt, of getting to know them. The Pont de la Tour has a fantastic position on the river, overlooking Tower Bridge, part of a refurbished warehouse complex. As we arrived, people were hanging from apartment windows and packing the open walkways to cheer both Tony and Bill, who was a huge international superstar.
Bill Clinton is an incredibly sociable person who loves ideas and loves talking, but who only really gets going after ten. If the evening takes off, you are guaranteed a fantastically interesting discussion, though you might regret it the next day. That evening did take off, the first of many we would enjoy together, and like so many others, it went on far longer than anyone expected. I found Hillary Clinton to be much warmer than her public persona might suggest. She has tremendous dignity and cares passionately about her and Bill’s joint project, which is to make the United States once again the land of opportunity not just for the advantaged, but for everyone.
Part of the restaurant had been sectioned off for us, though it had been agreed that we would order from the ordinary menu. What we ate, however, would not be revealed — at least that was the intention. The next morning, however, “Cherie Eats Foie Gras” was front-page news. Apart from the usual eye rolling from Alastair, the result was a torrent of abusive letters from animal lovers. The venom they unleashed shook me to the core. There were so many letters that we decided to set up a standard reply.
Until this incident I had replied to every letter personally. Indeed, before we moved into Downing Street, Fiona and Roz Preston had shared the job of looking after me, paid for by the Labour Party, and one of the first things we’d done on arrival was to see what Downing Street could offer in terms of secretarial support. After a great struggle, Norma Major had persuaded the government to fund a secretary for her four days a week. Like so much in Downing Street, we were never told what might be available; it was up to us to find out.
Nor were we told what things cost. Chequers came with a full complement of staff, yet there were charges that would arrive out of the blue, such as the cost of laundering napkins. It all depended on who had used the napkins. If it had been family or official visitors, the laundering was paid for. If the napkins had been used by somebody not on the official list, we were billed. The system was confusing, to say the least.
We had a nanny for the children — Ros and later Jackie, who succeeded her in 1998 — and a housecleaner for three hours every day. I remember laughing when Hillary told me that the White House had four chefs. At Number 11, just as in Richmond Crescent, the nanny would usually shop, and she and I would share the cooking. On Sunday nights I would get back from Chequers loaded down, like a teenager returning to college after a weekend at home, with dishes that the cook there had prepared (for which we paid) to help me through our busy Monday and Tuesday nights, when we had receptions.
No previous Prime Minister’s wife had had a full-time career. No previous Prime Minister’s wife had had school-age children living at home. Since Euan was born, I’d had two demanding jobs: mother and barrister. Now I had three, and juggling three balls is not the same as juggling two. My role as the Prime Minister’s wife might have not been official — as I was never allowed to forget — but it was time-consuming and important, and I had no intention of letting Tony down. We were in this together.
When the animal rights letters arrived, I asked if we might get help answering them from the garden girls, so called because their office on the lower ground floor overlooks the garden. My request was turned down. I was reminded that their role was to service the Prime Minister’s office, not his wife. Then I asked about ordering some Downing Street notepaper. They agreed to a heading reading “from the office of Mrs Cherie Blair, QC” but wouldn’t sanction “from the office of Cherie Booth, QC.” In Downing Street terms, I was Mrs. Blair, the head garden girl explained.
“Agreed,” I said, “but I am not Cherie Blair, QC. You could search with a magnifying glass, but no such person exists in the annals of the English Bar.” A compromise was eventually reached. I could use the address, but not the crest. If I wanted to use the crest, I would have to be Mrs. Blair.
Now, more than ten years later, I no longer feel the need to make the point. But in 1997 I felt I was hanging on to my identity by the thinnest of threads. I was entering a system that seemed to proclaim, “You are a nonperson except in as far as you are an appendage to the PM.”
What is certainly true is that the garden girls were under severe strain. When John Major was in Downing Street, letters to the Prime Minister ran around five thousand year. Once Tony arrived, the trickle became a flood, and the garden girls simply couldn’t cope. Not surprisingly, given the pressure they were under, the occasional mistake crept in. One example was a letter from a school for the deaf asking if Tony could visit the school. Although the letter had been written by the children themselves, they had received only a two-line standard reply. As I was known to have an interest in special-needs schools, the head wrote to me, enclosing copies of the original request and Downing Street’s reply. She accepted that the Prime Minister was busy, she said, but the children had made such an effort that maybe they deserved a better response. I couldn’t have agreed more.
From then on, it was agreed that any letters from children would be passed on to my office, so that even if Tony couldn’t send them a personal reply, I would. We ended up with a vast correspondence, as I soon discovered that the more you answer people, the more they tend to write back.
Within a matter of weeks, we attended our first international summit, the G7 (now G8). This annual meeting is hosted by one of the seven (now eight, including Russia) most powerful nations in the world — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States — and in 1997 it was America’s turn. Thus Denver, Colorado, was the setting for Tony’s first major appearance on the world stage. For me, flying over on the Concorde was a dream come true. (I still find it incredible that some way hasn’t been found to keep this masterpiece of engineering in the air.) The pilot and his crew were clearly the best of the best, and they invited me to go into the cockpit as it landed — a real privilege and something I will never forget.
The welcoming event was a country-and-western concert. In the presence of assembled Denver worthies, the ceremony began with the various leaders and their wives being trundled onto the stage in order of protocol and time in office. Tony, being the newest, was last.
“The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP, and Mrs. Cherie Blair,” the unseen speaker announced. As the spotlight picked us out, we walked onto the stage to thunderous applause. It was a totally surreal experience, similar to the one we’d had a few hours earlier as we’d walked down the steps from the Concorde, and the welcoming band had struck up “God Save the Queen.”
The G7/G8 is unusual among summits in that the wives (or husbands) are an intrinsic part of the event, and a separate, parallel program is organized by the host wife. As the G7 the following year would be ours to host, Tony and I were making the most of this opportunity to see how it worked. Tony had his team, and I had Fiona, although she hated flying and hated even more leaving her daughter Grace, who was still a toddler. My hairdresser, André, was also with me, though Alastair had made it clear that his presence was to be kept strictly under wraps. He hadn’t even been allowed to come on the same flight. We were lucky he made the trip, however; it was André who vetoed the cowgirl outfit, complete with tasseled boots and cowboy hat, that greeted me on arrival.
“You are not wearing that, Cherie,” he said as soon as he saw it. And he was right. It was basically a Halloween costume with what André described as a tablecloth for a skirt. Tony’s outfit was equally over-the-top, but he decided that the shirt was bearable, so he wore that with a pair of his own jeans. Unfortunately mine was an all-or-nothing situation, and to go out representing my country looking like Doris Day cracking her whip on the Deadwood stage just wasn’t appropriate. The Denver stage would have to make do with smart casual.
In spite of Alastair’s warnings that André should maintain a low profile, somebody saw him. Alastair’s response was that Mrs. Blair was paying for her hairdresser herself, as indeed I was. Then the story became spendthrift Cherie, chucking money away like nobody’s business. It was a steep learning curve: whatever I did, it seemed, I couldn’t win. It was the twentieth-century equivalent of the stocks: anything could be thrown at me with impunity.
The spouses’ program started on day two. I set off with the other wives (there were no husbands at this time) on one of those trains that you often see in Westerns, complete with viewing platform at the back. As we chugged up into the Rockies to gaze at the magnificent scenery, I was struck by how Hillary worked the crowds lined up along the embankments. Suddenly, something caught my eye, and at the same time Hillary said, “I think we should go back in now.” As we all trooped back inside, I mouthed, “Did you see what I saw?” She laughed and nodded. A man had “mooned” the passing train, but apparently none of the other ladies had noticed.
A line-dancing exhibition put on by a local pensioners’ group awaited us at our destination, and once again I saw how Hillary took the initiative, introducing us with an off-the-cuff speech. Even then I realized I was watching a master at work.
What I would have done without André I do not know. Although for a visit of this length, the Prime Minister always travels with an entourage of policy advisers, press officers, duty clerks, garden girls, ’tecs, and comms (communications) people, they were there to help him conduct his business. Their sole contribution to the domestic side of things was a note saying what time the luggage had to be ready for collection. In this regard, that last morning in Denver, André found me in a state of panic and began to help, folding Tony’s shirts, collecting the little piles of things he would take out of his pockets at night, and sorting out his suits, while I scrabbled round trying to retrieve odd shoes and socks from under the bed.
Next stop was Washington, where Tony and Bill were having bilateral talks. When I unpacked, I realized there was nothing he could wear; it all needed to be professionally pressed or re-ironed. This time André wasn’t there to help: Alastair had forbidden him to travel on the same plane, and he’d had to fly via Chicago. In the end the furor over André was so intense that Alastair banned him from coming on the next overseas trip. I would have to make do with local hairdressers like everybody else, he said.
Hillary asked if I’d be interested in seeing how she did things. By this time she had been First Lady for five years, so she and her staff had a huge amount of experience. Although there were obviously big differences between Downing Street and the White House, I thought I could learn from the way she handled the workload.
Her office was situated in the East Wing, where an entire department was devoted to invitations and menus. Being invited to the White House, she explained, was seen as an honor: invitations became like family heirlooms, lasting long after the dinner was forgotten. This hive of activity was known as the calligraphy department. Everything was printed from copper plates, and envelopes were addressed by hand in the most beautiful italic script.
“But it must be so labor-intensive,” I said, looking round at the mass of heads bent over their work. She explained that most of them were volunteers, old and young, who worked in the White House for the love of it. Some of them stayed for years, serving each president faithfully, like the person I met whose job it was to answer the mail addressed to Socks, the Clintons’ cat. Others were interns, young college graduates who spent around six months working in the White House solely for the experience. This system (pre–Monica Lewinsky) seemed an entirely good idea, and on my return to Downing Street, I put forward a proposal to the Cabinet office about the possibility of using interns as a way of coping with the rising tide of correspondence and associated work that we were struggling to deal with. This proposal was adopted, and interns were brought into a number of departments, though after a few years it became apparent that it wasn’t really saving the government that much money. Although the interns weren’t being paid, we had to have people to supervise them and plan everything. The program was stopped in 1999.
My tour round the First Lady’s office was incredibly useful. Hillary showed me the White House gifts they would take with them when traveling. These were not the gifts that would be exchanged on official visits, but smaller things, such as White House key rings, given to people who had generally been helpful. None of these gifts was very costly, just a token that was much appreciated. She also told me that she was planning a series of lectures in the White House, which would start in 1998, to commemorate the millennium. I later did the same.
Her final piece of advice would resonate the longest. “You’ve got to recognize,” she said, “that you’re not going to please everyone the whole time, and you’re certainly not going to please the press, and therefore you should just do what feels right to you. And so long as you feel it’s right for you, then don’t get too upset about what other people say.”
At the end of July 1997, after 150 years, Hong Kong was being handed back to China. It was both a political and a royal occasion, and it involved a mass exodus of senior personnel from Britain, including the Prince of Wales. As a result, there was a problem of transport. The Queen had the royal yacht Britannia, and she also had an aircraft. As the plane was nearing the end of its life, there had been talk of getting a new one, to be shared with the Prime Minister. This was eventually shelved for PR reasons, and from then on planes had to be chartered from British Airways (BA). In this case, however, Prince Charles would be returning on the royal yacht, which was already moored in Hong Kong, so it was decided that the Prime Minister would use the royal plane. The Prince would travel out with Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, on a chartered BA plane. (This was the occasion when Prince Charles famously was obliged to travel business class, as Cook, his wife, and Foreign Office officials had commandeered the first-class cabin. In a highly amusing, if ill-advised, epistle to friends, the Prince later complained about how small and cramped he’d found it.)
The royal plane was old and slow. The good news was that the front cabin could be transformed into a bedroom with two beds. The bad news was that it took nearly twice as long to get to Hong Kong as it normally did, as we had to refuel in Vladivostok. When we got out to stretch our legs, we were instructed not to move beyond a small area round the plane — not that we would have wanted to, it being ringed by Russian soldiers toting machine guns and looking distinctly menacing.
As always in these circumstances, as we came in to land in Hong Kong, there was a queue for the bathroom. By now I knew that the red carpet and a slew of photographers would be waiting, and I needed to look the part. Carole had worked out all my outfits, including the arrival one, which had been brought on board in a suit carrier. Suddenly, it was “Cabin crew, seats for landing,” and I was still in the bathroom making myself look respectable. There was nothing to do but just get on with it, I decided. At the moment of touchdown, I was standing on one leg, my bum hard up against the folding door and my other leg on the toilet seat, desperately trying to pull on my tights before emerging in the official outfit for the walk down the steps.
On the way back from that trip, Alastair said, “We can’t do that again.” André’s presence, he belatedly realized, had certain advantages. By the time the plane landed, I would be appropriately dressed and immaculately coiffed, no matter how long the flight or befuddled my head. No hair dryers were allowed on board, but André became a deft hand with gas-heated curling tongs.
As the handover ceremony began, just before midnight, the heavens opened, and I watched in admiration as Prince Charles began reading out a message from the Queen, which, thanks to the tropical downpour, was disintegrating in his hands. He was standing directly in front of me, his white tropical suit becoming increasingly diaphanous, which afforded me an interesting perspective on the future monarch. At midnight the flag of the People’s Republic of China and the regional flag of Hong Kong were raised simultaneously to the unfamiliar strains of the Chinese national anthem, and as the People’s Liberation Army goose-stepped their way into the hall, I felt a shiver run up my spine.