Chapter 23
Involvement with a particular charity often stems from personal tragedy, and in this I am no exception. My auntie Audrey was only the first of many wonderful women whose lives, having touched mine in one way or another, were cut short by breast cancer. I can’t remember now the first time I talked about her in public, but in 1997, shortly after we moved into Downing Street, I became a patron of Breast Cancer Care. I am also a patron of the Restoration of Appearance and Function Trust (RAFT), an organization devoted to helping patients in need of reconstructive plastic surgery. RAFT is based at the hospital where my dad had such fantastic treatment following his horrific accident.
Money is only part of what enables a charity to achieve its objectives. Equally important — sometimes more so — is raising public consciousness and, eventually, changing perceptions. In my early years, spare cash was never much in evidence, but I was able to help various charities in other ways: as a schoolgirl through practical help, working with Down syndrome children, and later through my legal expertise. Now the man I had married opened up another avenue. Well-known names, from royals to media personalities to someone like me who is less easily pigeonholed, can focus press attention in a way that, sadly, individual case histories cannot.
Even in the 1990s, breast cancer was not really talked about beyond the medical pages of serious newspapers. As I saw it, my job was to get women to talk openly about it. Only by removing the taboo, by making the vocabulary of self-examination and mammograms, of lumpectomies and prosthetics, part of the language of every woman, whatever her age, nationality, or background, could progress in early detection be made. Thanks to Alastair’s decision that where Cherie was concerned, less was more, I had become a bit of an enigma. As a result, when I did speak or write, it was published and noticed.
The death of David Attwood’s brother Michael at such a young age had never left me, and in the spring of 1998, I heard from Fiona that her friend Lindsay Nicholson’s daughter, Ellie, whom I’d got to know when I’d “edited” Prima, was suffering from the same kind of leukemia that her father, John Merritt, had died of. When I went to visit her in Great Ormond Street, London’s children’s hospital, I was incredibly impressed by the work of Sargent Cancer Care, a foundation focused on children with cancer, and asked if I could be of help. I have been involved with that organization ever since. Sadly, Ellie died on June 9, 1998.
That summer of 1998, I was able to extend my charitable networking in an unexpected quarter. One day, when Prince Charles and I were walking round the grounds at Highgrove, the Prince’s country home, he told me that he would sometimes allow groups in to look at the gardens. My cousin Paul Thompson, one of the family priests, had been working for many years for the Supportive Help and Development Organisation (SHADO), a drug prevention charity based at Liverpool Cathedral. He had recently died, still only in his forties, from an embolism following an injury to his knee, and I’d been asked if I would like to get involved in the charity. Each year, one of SHADO’s main fund-raising events was a sponsored walk ending up at a stately home. In 1997 I’d welcomed the walkers for tea at Chequers. Plucking up courage, I asked the Prince whether he would consider allowing SHADO to look round his garden. Drug-related charities find it extremely difficult to attract funds, and I was quite prepared for him to say no. He didn’t, and in 1999 SHADO’s sponsored walk ended with tea and cakes at Highgrove.
It was now time, I decided, to unlock the potential of Downing Street itself. Although Margaret Thatcher and Norma Major had used Number 10 to host charitable receptions, I felt we could do a good deal more. The great state rooms on the first floor were empty for so much of the time. Why not put them to greater use?
In particular, both Tony and I were keen to extend the range of people who saw behind the famous facade. Gradually a system evolved whereby on Monday nights, Tony and I would host a large reception for more than two hundred people who came from a particular work sector — such as the police or social workers. Then every Tuesday I would host a reception for a charity. Initially they were “mine” — that is, charities of which I was a patron or was otherwise officially involved with. But that was purely practical: I offered and they accepted. As word spread of these Tuesday evenings, however, requests from other charities began to come in, and between 1998 and 2007, I hosted one every week, apart from August and the holiday periods. Regulations governing the use of public buildings prevented these evenings from being direct fund-raising events, but a charity could use the event to raise its profile or as a thank-you to major donors. The charity paid for whatever food or drink was involved. The number of guests was limited to a maximum of forty, so that I could talk to each of them personally. I would also address the guests about the charity, its aims, its successes, and how they could help, and I would offer to have my photograph taken with each one. These events were never advertised, never mentioned in the press, but somehow word of them got around, and over the following years I was able to learn much about the fantastic unsung work that goes on up and down our country and overseas.
Furthermore, from the contacts I was making during Tony’s official visits abroad, I became increasingly aware of the potential of what is loosely — and often disparagingly — called networking. On my return to England following my trip to Gaza, for example, I was able to arrange for equipment and supplies to be sent out to a girls’ school run by Mrs. Arafat and the center for special-needs children I’d visited.
I was also aware of how the average constituent had no chance of visiting Downing Street, so every month I invited ten MPs from across the parties each to bring three children, each accompanied by a parent, to tea. It was a way of ensuring that kids from all over the country had the opportunity. I always told the children that I hoped that at least one of them would return here one day as Prime Minister and asked them to promise me that if they did, they would invite me back.
That summer we did our usual lurch across Europe, made less spontaneous by the constant presence of our security detail — nice though they were — and garden girls. By mid-August our increasingly unwieldy cavalcade was back in France. We were there when news came through of the Omagh car bombing.
Omagh continues to appall. Twenty-nine people died, and more than two hundred were injured in the blast. Responsibility was later claimed by a nationalist splinter group calling itself the Real IRA, as opposed to the Provisional IRA, whose political arm, Sinn Féin, had been party to the Good Friday Agreement. Tony borrowed a suit and black tie for the immediate television response, then flew straight to Belfast from Toulouse airport.
Though not physically present at Hillsborough during the talks, Bill Clinton had played a key part in the negotiations, and two weeks after the atrocity, on September 3, Bill, Hillary, Tony, and I flew into Omagh to see for ourselves the devastation that had been achieved by just one bomb attached to an old car parked in the main shopping street on a Saturday afternoon. Hillary is not as spontaneously charming as her husband, and this was the first time I saw her compassionate side. She was moved beyond words by what we heard and saw. It brought tears to our eyes to talk to the people who had lost loved ones.
But this was not tragedy tourism: Tony knew that it was imperative to get Sinn Féin to condemn the bombers and at the same time persuade the Protestants not to react. He also knew that Bill’s physical presence, his unequivocal condemnation of the atrocity, and his renewed commitment to the peace talks would be crucial if the terrorists were not to achieve their aim.
Until we arrived at Number 10, I had considered chambers as archaic a setup as was possible to imagine at the end of the twentieth century. I was wrong. Downing Street was positively feudal. On the technical side, computers featured hardly at all. That obviously had to change, as by 1997 everyone in Tony’s office was using a computer. Then there were the garden girls. They were the crème de la crème of the Civil Service secretarial elite, and until we moved in, they were obliged to wear skirts; trousers were even forbidden at Chequers.
“This is just nonsense,” I told the Cabinet secretary. “There are Tony and I in our jeans. It’s ridiculous to expect the garden girls to be wearing twinsets and pearls.” Grudgingly that was allowed.
Then there was the question of rooms. The best and largest in Number 10 was the domain of the two principal private secretaries: one from the Foreign Office and one from the Treasury. John Major had worked in the Cabinet room itself, so this had a certain logic, as there were big double doors connecting the two rooms. Tony, however, preferred something less grandiose. All that was available was a former waiting room to the left of the Cabinet room, so that was where he was put. When I found out where he was spending his workday, I couldn’t believe it. “Why are those two civil servants having the big room while the Prime Minister is in this little cubbyhole?” I asked.
The problem was simply lack of space. Downing Street was cracking at the seams, and no amount of shuffling people around would change that.
It was around this time that I had a brain wave. What about the Number 10 flat? That was completely vacant. Though officially Gordon’s, he didn’t use it. I had also noticed that a room opposite the entrance to our own flat, Number 11, seemed to be used by the Treasury simply for storing chairs. Meanwhile, personnel had a room the size of a large cupboard off a corridor next to the main entrance of Number 10, and visitors were having to hang round the entrance hall because there was no waiting room. I thought, This is completely ludicrous. So I put all these ideas to Tony and said he should talk to Gordon about it. “You’ve got to do something,” I said. “It’s simply not fair to your staff.”
“Cherie, please listen to me. I’m sure you mean well, but don’t get involved. At some point we’ll get round to it, but frankly there are more important things on the agenda.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’d had plenty of experience of my ideas being discounted. This time, however, I decided to take the law into my own hands. So I picked up the phone and spoke to Sue Nye, Gordon’s longtime aide. “I want to come and see Gordon,” I said.
Consternation in the Treasury! They immediately rang Tony to find out what was going on. He then called me and asked me to explain myself.
“I simply want to make the case that it’s in everyone’s interest, including his as Chancellor, to husband public resources. You won’t go and see him, so I will.”
By now I had my appointment, so it was too late to do anything to stop me. Off I trotted to the Treasury and was duly ushered in.
“Look, Gordon,” I said, “we’ve got a real problem at Number Ten. It’s overcrowded. The personnel department has nowhere they can talk to people alone. Yet there’s a perfectly good room outside our flat which is currently unused.” And if that wasn’t acceptable, then what about the Number 10 flat? Surely part of that could be used, I suggested, if only as meeting rooms.
“I’ve got no objections personally,” he explained, “but I owe it to future Chancellors of the Exchequer to preserve the integrity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s rooms.”
“Are you telling me you can’t ease this terrible overcrowding because of some hypothetical situation in the future? Come on, Gordon. If only as a personal favor to me . . .”
No doubt he had a thousand more pressing matters to worry about than an empty room at Number 11. No doubt it wasn’t my place to push. But the pressure on the staff at Number 10 was becoming unbearable. Even so, as I sat there getting nowhere, I began to think I had overstepped the mark. He said that he would think about it and left.
Later I was informed that he’d decided we could have the room opposite the flat entrance. Unbelievably, Number 10 then spent £10,000 redecorating it, but at least it released more space downstairs, so it was worth the embarrassment.
As for Tony, he did eventually move to the principal private secretaries’ room, after which it became known as “the den.”
By chance Tony’s first visit to mainland China, in October 1998, coincided with an initiative organized by the Bar Council’s international committee, relating to a conference in Beijing concerning the rights of the accused. My job was simply to introduce the session and generally explain what the delegates were going to see, which was a mock trial demonstrating how the British system worked. I then went off to see a group of women lawyers for a roundtable discussion about discrimination law in China. China was then still a country of bicycles and blue-Mao-suited workers — male and female, everyone looked the same. Just six years later, on my next visit, the consumer revolution was in full swing. Men and women could be clearly identified, and cars had transformed the look of the streets, though they were being driven as if they were bicycles. Color was everywhere, except in the sky, which remained an opaque gray whatever the weather — the result of the appalling pollution.
Before that first visit, Hillary Clinton had warned me about bugging. When she and Bill had been to Beijing, she told me, their security team had rigged up a soundproof tent in their bedroom, the only place, they were told, where they could talk safely. After a good night’s sleep at the official guesthouse attached to the Forbidden City, Tony and I awoke to find André in a state of near hysteria. He’d woken in the small hours to find somebody in his room going through his things. Most of our delegation, we later heard, had had the same experience. If that wasn’t enough, André said, he’d been having a shower when he noticed that instead of the mirror misting up, a large rectangle remained unnervingly clear. Apparently we were all under surveillance as well.
I had taken the decision fairly early on that there was not much point in swanning round the world as some sort of glorified tourist. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do something useful. Increasingly, whenever Tony and I went away together on an official visit, it became standard for me to have my own program.
It was clearly important that I did nothing overtly political, but gradually the Foreign Office began to see how I might be useful. From its perspective, the great plus was my profession. As a barrister, I had the credentials to talk to other lawyers anywhere in the world. As our embassies would always have some sort of initiative in hand involving the law, my ability to talk to judges and senior lawyers proved useful: I could take soundings, testing the water at an informal (though informed) level. The promotion of women’s rights, for example, is not always an easy subject to address, particularly in non-Christian countries. Yet not only would this fulfill the embassy’s human rights objectives, but anything that encouraged people to use the common-law model was obviously good for our legal services, which are a large part of our “invisible” exports.
Early the following year, 1999, Tony and I paid our second visit to South Africa. We had first gone in the autumn of 1996, during his preelection tour of world leaders, and I was able during that week to visit Albie Sachs, who’d been appointed by Mandela two years earlier to lead the team writing the new South African constitution. As a human rights lawyer, I found it both a fascinating experience and a real privilege to be able to discuss the way the constitutional committee was drafting the human rights elements of the constitution. I also visited the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the brainchild of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Nelson Mandela defies all preconceptions. In person he is tall and wiry, with a shock of white hair above a calm, near-beatific face. But what struck me most forcibly was his old-world courtesy, and not only to the great and the good. The first time he came to see us in Downing Street, Euan was off school with a cold but very anxious to meet the great man. When it came to it, our son was completely overawed and managed to stammer out, “It’s so wonderful to meet you.” With this gentle voice, Mandela replied, “And it’s really nice to meet you, Euan.” And I felt that he really meant it. On another occasion Euan introduced him to a friend from the London Oratory School, James Dove, whose father was from South Africa and had been involved with the African National Congress (ANC) during the apartheid years. Again Mandela was incredibly courteous to this young man. It was clear that this was something he did all the time.
Tony’s last official visit as Prime Minister, in 2007, just before he stepped down, was to South Africa, and it was a great joy to find Mandela still alert though incredibly frail. The people around him were very protective. No one could use flash photography near him, for example; all those years spent breaking up stones in the glaring light of Robbin Island had affected his eyes. He still had the most incredible presence, but he was also still so gentle and unassuming.
During our visit in 1996, we were taken to an AIDS orphanage called Nazareth House in Cape Town, run by the same order of nuns as the orphanage just down from Seafield School in Crosby. Nuns, I have found, usually fall into two distinct categories: old battle-axes or really sweet. These were the sweet ones, and they were thrilled to see Tony. There was a little girl called Ntombi who for some reason attached herself to Tony. Then age three or four, she lifted up her arms and demanded to be carried, which he duly did. When we asked about sponsoring her, we were warned that she was HIV positive. With sad smiles, the nuns reminded us of the graveyard we had seen, filled with names and dates recording tragically short lives. Tony and I looked at each other, and the decision was made. Thus Ntombi was the first child we sponsored from Nazareth House. Over the years we developed a close relationship with her. She did really well in school and at fifteen was able to return home to live with her grandmother and other members of her family. She is still very much alive.
We have also sponsored other children from Nazareth House. All of these children have been HIV positive, but many have had other disabilities as well. One little girl who we met on our first visit, for example, had been abandoned in the road, and ants had eaten out her eyes.
Children like Ntombi no longer live in the orphanage but are looked after by foster mothers in a nearby township, in “families” of around seven children each. These foster mothers are set up and funded by the nuns, while Nazareth House is used only for the most severely disabled children.
Taking a year off before starting university, our daughter, Kathryn, went to work at Nazareth House. I had told her the story of the little blind girl, and the first time we spoke on the telephone, she told me that the girl was still there. Sadly, however, she died shortly afterward of meningitis. Her death was a big blow for the nuns; they hadn’t lost many children in recent years because of the dramatic improvements in the treatment of AIDS.
This is not the place to go into the vastly problematic question of Kosovo and its history as an ethnically Albanian province within Tito’s Yugoslavia. Though predominantly Muslim, Kosovo is considered by the Serbs to be central to Serbia’s identity as a Christian frontline state. Under Slobodan Milosˇevic´, Serbian forces had increased ethnic repression in Kosovo, but as the 1990s drew to a close, Kosovan freedom fighters (the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA) began striking back. By the end of 1998 the situation was acute. Demands that Serbia solve the problem fell on deaf ears, and the fighting intensified. Atrocities were occurring on both sides, and as a result, refugees were pouring out of the country into Macedonia, to the south. The hope was that if Serbia was threatened with NATO air strikes, it would withdraw from Kosovo. But Tony was convinced — along with the British military — that only the threat of ground troops would shift Milosˇevic´. America, however, did not relish the idea of “body bags,” and during the spring of 1999 Tony was putting all his energy into trying to persuade the Americans, via Bill Clinton, that the threat of ground troops was the only language that Milosˇevic´ understood.
Throughout that time, Tony was constantly on the phone to America. Because of the timing, these calls would often come late in the evening, when he was in the flat. If he made the call, he would do so from our living room, where the special secure line to Washington was installed. When the calls originated from America, and came late at night or in the small hours of the morning, I would answer them, as the phone was always on my side of the bed. The disruption never bothered me, as I have always been more of a night person than Tony.
Although I never heard both sides of the conversation, I was very aware that Tony was constantly saying to Bill, “This cannot go on; we must do something. If we face Milosˇevic´ down, not only will he back down, but the Russians will make him back down. But they have to understand that we really mean it.” On March 24, 1999, bombing of the Serbian capital of Belgrade began. After that, the only further threat was a land invasion, increasingly the option preferred by NATO military personnel on the ground. Four NATO countries — Britain, France, Germany, and Italy — had troops on the Macedonian border ready to intervene, but America continued to stay out. “I feel like I’m out on a limb here,” Tony used to say. “As if I’m on this big tree, at the end of a branch, and at any minute it’s going to give. They’ll saw through, and that will be me done for.” (“They” were the more cautious Clinton advisers.)
On April 24 Tony went to Chicago to deliver a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. The world, he said, is such that now we cannot just let these appalling things happen. We have to intervene, and in terms of Kosovo, success was the only exit strategy NATO was prepared to consider. “We will not have succeeded until an international force has entered Kosovo and allowed the refugees to return to their homes.”
A week later we were in Macedonia. This was the first time since Tony had taken office that British troops were poised for action. By speaking to our soldiers on the front line — part of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps led by General Mike Jackson — and seeing the refugee disaster for himself, he believed that he would be in a stronger position to argue the case for American involvement on the ground.
As with all such visits, Tony’s itinerary was not broadcast in advance, and at the end of the previous week, I had spent two days in the House of Lords arguing an equal-pay case on behalf of part-time workers at Barclays Bank. Now, on Monday, we were in Skopje, the capital of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (as we had to be careful to call it, because of the sensitivity of the Greeks, who believe they have rights to the name). The capital was little more than a provincial outpost and our embassy little more than a consulate. Just talking to the staff, we realized that it had been quite difficult for Muslim and Christian staff members to work together with such terrible things going on just a few miles away.
A helicopter took us to a large refugee camp on the border with Kosovo. Everywhere we looked, there were white tents, rows of them stretching far off in the distance. The moment they realized who had arrived, the shouts rang out: “Ton-ee! Ton-ee! Ton-ee!” They already saw him as the man who was going to get them out of this horror. We moved from tent to tent with an interpreter, listening to stories of how these people had lived for years perfectly peaceably within their community, then how their neighbors — previously friends — had turned on them and threatened them with violence. We heard how they’d managed to get out, leaving everything behind. Although from the outside these tents were identical, inside they were all different. Each woman had done what she could to make her tent welcoming and comfortable for what remained of her family. It was humbling.
From there we were taken up to the crossing point, looking out across no-man’s-land to the queue of refugees waiting to cross over into Macedonia and the sanctuary of the camp. The line snaked back as far as I could see. Everyone was laden with suitcases and bundles of what were probably clothes and linens. We were then taken to the head of the line, where people just wanted to shake our hands. The interpreter went with Tony, while I talked to people who spoke English, by definition educated. I remember a lawyer and a professor at Pristina University, both of whom had previously led uneventful lives. Life under communism may not have been particularly comfortable, they said, but they had never really known hardship. Now this had happened. They had no idea what awaited them — not a job in a university, that’s for sure.
Even though I was born after World War II, when I was a child, games of Germans versus English were still commonplace, and I remember the stories my primary-school teacher Mr. Smerdon used to tell of the concentration camps. As I walked down this unending queue, faces marked by exhaustion and fear, I was deeply shocked. These people were being picked on because of their religion, because they were Muslims. What did Europe think it was doing? We had been there and done that. We didn’t need to go back.
Three months later, at the end of July, Tony returned, this time to Pristina in Kosovo itself, and this time as a true hero. His plan had worked. America had agreed to commit ground troops, and the moment it had done so, Milosˇevic´ had backed down. There are, apparently, hundreds of small boys called Tony running around the newly independent Kosovo.