Chapter 24
My post-1997 career at the Bar was progressing as well as could be expected given the difficulties of reconciling the Downing Street agenda with the Gray’s Inn Square agenda. That wasn’t my only problem. Shortly after we moved in, Number 10 decided to “take a view” on a case that I had been approached to do. I resisted. As a professional woman, I told them, I had to be allowed to get on with my profession. I invoked the cab-rank principle, my line being that as soon as I started making choices, I was in trouble. Even though they knew this was my position, over the next ten years the office would sometimes indicate that they would rather I did not do a particular case. I never knew exactly who it was “taking a view.” Tony would simply deliver the message. As for who was standing behind Tony, it was “the office” or “Number 10.” It was as if these anonymous people would all participate in a discussion — including my husband but excluding me — and come to “a view.” The rationale was always the same: the press would write stories along the lines of “Cherie is suing the government,” thus embarrassing the Prime Minister. My voice was never heard in these discussions. Nevertheless, the cab-rank argument was always accepted, until the next difficult case came along and we went through the whole thing again.
My fears that my career would suffer were already being justified. It wasn’t so much the money; I loved my work. Not only were my official duties taking their toll, but while a few people wanted Cherie Booth, QC, because they wanted the attendant publicity, others wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole, as publicity was the last thing they desired. It was rarely overt, but word got round.
Shortly after we moved into Downing Street, I sat as a recorder (a part-time judge), something senior barristers do to learn the ropes. The case concerned an old lady who had been evicted from her retirement home because she was being disruptive, going round complaining that the other old ladies were stupid. Before I passed judgment, she told me, “I want you to know that I have always voted Labour, and I voted for your husband in the general election.” On the basis of the evidence, I imposed a suspended possession order on her, in effect delaying the eviction provided she behaved herself in the future, at which news her attitude toward me suddenly changed. “I will never vote Labour again!”
Arguing the same point of law but from the opposite point of view happens all the time, and it certainly keeps you intellectually focused. In 1997 I did a case in which a lesbian rail worker wanted to claim free rail travel for her partner. Heterosexual partners, even if they weren’t married, were entitled to this perk, but Lisa Grant couldn’t get it for her same-sex partner and claimed sex discrimination. I argued the case for her in the European Court in Luxembourg, but we eventually lost.
Under the British legal system, judges start life as barristers, then recorders. In 1996 I was made an assistant recorder, and in July 1999 I became a full recorder. Both recorders and judges are kept up-to-date by a body called the Judicial Studies Board, and toward the end of September I went on one of the three-yearly update courses. On the night of the twenty-third, a couple of old barrister friends and I went out for a birthday supper: my forty-fifth. I was feeling very positive. That summer we had had a good break in Italy, and Tony was feeling relaxed. All the energy he had expended over Kosovo had been worth it. Sitting there, raising a glass of champagne, I saw only one little shadow on my immediate horizon: my period. Where was it?
“It’s a bit odd,” I told Tony when he rang me that night from Chequers. “I’m usually so regular.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “Probably just my age. Don’t worry.”
He wasn’t about to. He was working on his Labour Party Conference speech and was paying little attention to anything else. But there was a little niggle at the back of my mind.
A few weeks before, we had been on the usual prime ministerial weekend at Balmoral. The first year we had actually stayed overnight, in 1998, I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked for me: not only my clothes but also the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag, with its range of unmentionables. This year I had been a little more circumspect and had not packed my contraceptive equipment, out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another . . .
But then I thought, I can’t be. I’m too old. It must be the menopause.
Once back from the course, I met up with Carole at the gym. “I know it sounds odd,” I said, “but do you think you could get me a pregnancy testing kit?” It was hardly something I could pop into the local chemist for. She brought it round on Thursday, and on Friday morning, lo and behold. I just couldn’t believe it.
I rang Tony immediately. “The test,” I said. “It’s come up positive.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means I think I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, my God.”
That evening he came back from Chequers, and as soon as there was an opportunity, I showed him the little dipper and explained the significance of the blue line.
“How reliable is it?” he asked. I said I didn’t know, but Carole had got me another one, though I’d have to wait to do that the following morning.
“We’ll have to tell Alastair.”
Alastair and Fiona came up the next morning before we set off for Bournemouth and the conference. The second test had shown the same little blue line.
“So how pregnant are you exactly?” Alastair asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are we talking weeks or months?”
“Weeks.”
He seemed more amused than anything else. They took the view that given it was still very early days, the best thing was to keep quiet. By chance I had already agreed to return to London on Monday for a Breast Cancer Care event. I’d leave a little earlier than planned to see my GP.
As arranged, Fiona and I took the train back to London on Monday. Rather than risk making a big deal of it, I went along to the general surgery at the Westminster Health Centre. It turned out that my usual doctor, Susan Rankin, wasn’t there, so I saw another partner.
“So, Mrs. Blair,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“I think I’m pregnant,” I replied with a smile. The poor man fell to pieces.
I had to calm him down. He didn’t want to do an internal examination, he said. Feeling obliged to have at least a bit of a prod of my tummy, he kept saying, “Susan should be doing this.”
“What about one of your tests?” I suggested. “Presumably it would be reliable?”
Relief flooded over him.
“Well?” Fiona said when I went out.
“End of May.”
The next day it was very hard not to mention it. Traditionally we had a lunch for family and friends while Tony made the final adjustments to his speech. My half sister Sarah, who now worked as a journalist under the name Lauren Booth, had just had a miscarriage — she had written about it in a newspaper — so the last thing I wanted was to upset her further. I didn’t tell my father for fear that he might let it slip.
Only those in the know would have spotted the twinkle in Tony’s eye at a particular point in his speech that afternoon. By pure coincidence, one of his speechwriters had drafted a passage about children.
“To our children, we are irreplaceable. If anything happened to me, you’d soon find a new leader. But my kids wouldn’t find a new dad. There is no more powerful symbol of our politics than the experience of being on a maternity ward. Seeing two babies side by side. Delivered by the same doctors and midwives. Yet two totally different lives ahead of them.” As Tony spoke those lines, he glanced at me, because we both knew that very soon we would be in that hospital ward ourselves.
The plan was to keep the number of people in the loop very small. Now that it was confirmed, I decided I wanted a bit of private time with the idea of this baby. I also was conscious that, particularly at forty-five, things could go wrong, although I was personally convinced that everything was going to be all right. I had decided I wanted to get past the twelve- to thirteen-week mark before extending word beyond the tight-knit group. Also, we were due to go to Florence for a seminar that Tony and Bill Clinton had set up, and the last thing I wanted was for the focus to shift onto me. We’d wait till we came back from Florence, by which time it would probably be obvious, but at least we would be in control of the announcement.
I told my mum, my sister, and Jackie, our nanny. (Ros had left us in July 1998 to do a teacher-training course, a long-held ambition.) Jackie was thrilled. For any nanny worth the name, school-age children are all very well, but a baby is heaven.
I was a bit worried about telling the kids. I wanted them to know, but I remember thinking, They are going to think this is disgusting. I mean, parents! But they were fantastic about it and really excited. Kathryn came with me to an early scan, and as we walked along to the ultrasound department, I realized with a start that with me being so obviously middle-aged, people might think my prepubescent daughter was the one who was pregnant.
Once the Labour Party Conference was over, Susan Rankin gave me a proper examination. “You do realize,” she said, “that the statistics for Down’s and other abnormalities shoot up at your age.”
I did, but having got this far, I didn’t want to risk any damage to the baby, so I decided that an amniocentesis was out. I had a blood test and a scan, however, and all appeared well.
Over the next few days, the tight-knit group appeared to be stretching. Tony told Anji because, he said, she would be upset if he didn’t. Then he told me he’d told Gordon.
“What business can it possibly be of Gordon’s?” I remonstrated.
“You have to understand, Cherie. It’s a very sensitive topic for him. The whole issue of my being a family man is very sensitive to him.” He was only thinking of Gordon’s feelings, he said.
Pregnant or not, we trundled on. As few people knew the news, there were no concessions to my delicate condition. Early on, I took the train from Liverpool Street station to Norwich to celebrate the opening of new offices for a big firm of legal-aid solicitors. Halfway there, overcome with nausea, I was sick all over everything. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and fortunately the carriage was empty, so I was able to go into the toilet and clean myself up. Then I went back to the carriage to scrub away at the seat and floor, all the time thinking, This is hard, hard, hard.
Another time we were up in the constituency, and I was with a Number 10 driver named Dave. Suddenly I knew I was going to be sick. Dave stopped the car, retrieved a bucket out of the back, and held it while I vomited my guts out. He was so kind that day that I swore then I would love him forever.
I was finding out the hard way that I wasn’t thirty anymore. At one point I went up to Liverpool to do something for Jospice. Now a worldwide hospice movement, it had been started by Father Francis O’Leary, a Crosby boy born and bred. As always I stayed with my old friend Cathy, who has six kids, her youngest then being about four, while her oldest was older than Euan. Exhausted from the journey, I went upstairs to one of the girls’ bedrooms where I’d be sleeping. The six-year-old had just got back from school, and the four-year-old was generally rushing about. I was sitting on the bed, trying to catch my breath, when Cathy came in with a cup of tea, and I burst into tears.
“What on earth is the matter?” she said.
“I’m pregnant. And I’m just remembering what it’s like. The chaos, the noise. How can I possibly do all this in Downing Street?” It wasn’t the first time I’d had such negative thoughts. It had taken over two years, but we had just got everything organized in Number 11 — the kitchen, our bathroom, the children’s rooms — and now we were going to have dirty diapers and sleepless nights. Sitting there, I was overwhelmed by the immensity of it. And at the same time, I thought, How dare I? Here was Cathy, struggling to make ends meet. Her husband had just lost his job, and she was doing part-time teaching. But there she was, a good Catholic mother, bringing up these lovely, happy children.
One afternoon in mid-November, I had a call from Fiona. I was due to give a speech later that day.
“Just to warn you, there may be a slight problem,” she said. Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, had just spoken to Alastair and implied he knew I was pregnant. “He needs Alastair to confirm or deny it, and Alastair can’t lie.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s not his baby. Why doesn’t he just say he doesn’t know?”
“Because he does know.”
“But who could have told the Mirror?”
“Lauren?”
“No. She doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her.” And anyway, I knew that my half sister would never betray me, not over a thing like that. I went through everybody in my head. Sally Morgan wouldn’t do it, nor Anji, even though I hadn’t wanted her to know. I was sure it couldn’t have come from the hospital. The scan had been registered under a different name, and they hadn’t put me on the computer. That left Gordon. But what could he possibly have to gain by telling the Daily Mirror?
I called Alastair: “Why can’t you just say that it’s early days and we don’t want to announce it yet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Cherie. This is his big scoop.”
“I don’t want Piers Morgan to have a big scoop over my body, thank you very much.”
“Okay, then we’ll put it out over PA [Press Association]. The only way to handle it now is to make it a non-Mirror exclusive.” This suited Alastair, because if Piers did get a scoop, the other papers would be furious. For Alastair, dealing with the tabloids was like juggling with raw eggs.
“We’ll have a quote from Tony and a quote from you,” he said, and hung up.
On the way to the meeting, Fiona’s cell phone rang. It was Rebekah Wade, deputy editor of the Sun. “The announcement must be out — you might as well talk to her,” Fiona mouthed.
I took the phone. I’d known Rebekah for some time and had a certain amount of respect for her: a woman making her way in the male world of Fleet Street.
We had a girly chat, along the usual just-pregnant lines, and that was that. The next morning this intimate girly conversation was plastered all over the Sun. From being a Mirror exclusive, it had become a Sun exclusive, and Piers was furious. To this day he remains convinced that I spoke to the Sun deliberately to thwart him. What I certainly didn’t know when I talked to Rebekah was that at the time Fiona handed me the phone, the news had not gone out on PA. It did go out eventually that night, but not till later. Though I have my suspicions about how the Sun found out, they have never been confirmed.
The truth is that Piers still had his scoop. He made sure everyone knew that he had got the story and that it was he who had forced Number 10 to go public. But Rebekah was the only person who actually spoke to me. Piers never forgave me for spoiling his party, and over the years his resentment turned into outright hatred.
From then on, Cherie and the pregnancy were everywhere. The coverage was so positive that we heard there were some in Gordon’s camp who thought we’d done it deliberately, to undermine Gordon. However, there was something rather unnerving about reading in the papers a score of doctors and professors going on about elderly mothers, the risks of brain damage, and the rest of it. “Of course she’ll have a cesarean,” the press said, and they had all the diagrams. But I thought, Wait a minute, guys. This is my body and my decision!
My obstetrician, Zoë Penn, said that as Kathryn had been a cesarean, normal practice would be to have another. But I was adamant that because the aftermath last time had been so grim, unless it was dangerous to the baby, I wanted a vaginal birth. The concern was that the stress of labor would open up the scar, which would be damaging to me.
We were always very clear that if the baby was a boy, we would name him for Tony’s dad. He was going, as we declared, to be all the things that Grandpa Leo could have been but for the fact he’d had a stroke in his forties. Tony’s father loved politics and had once had ambitions to stand for Parliament himself — as a Tory! Now he was finding life even more frustrating, as he’d recently had another stroke and had lost the ability to speak. I was so convinced the baby was a boy that we didn’t really think of a girl’s name. Bookmakers were by then taking bets, and I remember Euan coming to me and saying, “Why don’t I just put a bet down?”
“Don’t you dare!” I said. “The press would have a field day, and rightly so.”
Among those who did put a bet on was a member of the Protestant negotiating team in the Northern Ireland talks. After the announcement he’d sidled up to Tony to congratulate him. “Great news, Tony. And what might you be thinking of calling the new arrival?”
Tony told him. A few months after Leo was born, Tony saw this same fellow, sporting an impressive tan. “You’re looking well,” he said. “Been on holiday?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “And all thanks to you. I got very good odds on Leo if the Blair baby turned out to be a boy, and the whole family got to go away on the proceeds.”
The other question that every parent is faced with is, where will the new baby go? The obvious place in our setup was Euan’s room, next door to ours. As Euan had just turned sixteen, the sensible thing was to put him on the attic floor above. It was currently being used as offices and a bedroom for the duty officer, but it would make a nice little flat, with a small bathroom already there. The duty officer would need somewhere to sleep, and as the Number 10 flat was still unused, that appeared to offer a solution. This time no way was I going to see Gordon, so it was all done through the office. Although Gordon agreed to release the rooms, there were conditions attached: he wanted to make clear that this was a short-term arrangement and that when Euan went to university — at this stage more than two years away — he wanted those rooms back. Tony agreed.
“What do you mean, you agreed? Where’s Euan going to live when he comes home for the holidays?” I demanded.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll never happen. Once we’ve got the rooms, it’ll never happen.” And indeed it never did. Euan moved upstairs, feeling very grown-up and not ousted by the new arrival at all.
Every November, at a ceremony to mark the official opening of Parliament, the government sets out its program for the following year. This is known as the Queen’s Speech, and it is indeed spoken by the Queen, although the words are written by the government. In 1997 one proposal in the Queen’s Speech concerned the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Britain was already bound by the convention, new legislation was required to allow pertinent cases to be dealt with on home ground, rather than at the European Court in Strasbourg. This plan would not be fully implemented until October 2000, but from 1998 on, like-minded people began to talk about the possibility of setting up an interdisciplinary set of chambers that had human rights at its heart. At the same time, these chambers would be modern, with cutting-edge computer systems and clerks who didn’t have to call us sir or miss. There were lawyers in London who did international law, but they were mainly commercial sets. There was also the odd barrister who did individual cases in Strasbourg, but these barristers were spread out across several sets of chambers and were all juniors. If this system was to take off, it needed a silk. Many of the people interested in the idea were either former pupils of mine or people I had brought on at Gray’s Inn Square. In all, there were five or six of us interested in the proposal.
Things began to firm up in October 1999, when David Wolfe came to see me. The first official meeting in this regard was at the Russell Hotel in Russell Square. About ten people were present. I was the only silk, and we talked about who else we might approach.
While discussions continued, we heard that the old police station at the end of Gray’s Inn, used by traffic wardens for the past few years, was being converted into offices by the Inn. One of the problems in setting up a new chambers with an entirely new ethos was finding a building that we wouldn’t need to share. We had imagined we’d have to move outside the Inn and take on a commercial lease. Now that this rare opportunity had presented itself, we had to grab it, even though we weren’t entirely ready. We all told our various chambers, and the die was cast.
As part of the belated modernization of our chambers at 4–5 Gray’s Inn Square, we recruited Amanda Illing, who had previously worked as private secretary to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Barbara Mills. By the spring of 2000, she had learned the skills of clerking under Leslie Page and Michael Kaplan, who had clerked for me. So Amanda became our first clerk, although she was never called that, except by me through a slip of the tongue. Now she was our practice manager, later practice director, and has been a source of strength throughout.
Inevitably people interested in the new set of chambers fell by the wayside. Whereas some wanted a niche practice, I was among those who favored something more encompassing. In the end we had twenty-six practitioners, and those of us who were silks had to personally guarantee the bank debt that would be needed to start up a new set.
Usually chambers are called after their physical address or, occasionally, lawyers a long time dead. “The Old Police Station” hardly sent out the right signals. Clare Montgomery, QC, a successful criminal fraud practitioner, came up with Matrix, meaning, according to a definition she found in a dictionary, the intersection of ideas. By this time the Bar was increasingly split into criminal and civil sets. We were doing the opposite, bringing together the disciplines but focusing on human rights and civil liberties. A submeaning of “matrix” turned out to be fertility. As I was pregnant, and four other members’ wives also were pregnant, this seemed a good omen. However, Matrix on its own, we decided, sounded a bit too radical. Thus Matrix Chambers was born.
Every aspect of the new chambers was subject to scrutiny. To start with, we were nonhierarchical. Instead of listing our members by seniority of call to the Bar, we were listed alphabetically, and the allocation of rooms was done by drawing lots. At the time, such innovations were seen as being radical and spurred much discussion.
By then, thanks to my familiarity with information technology, I was increasingly working from home. I finished my last case on May 17, 2000. To the delight of the press, it concerned parental leave. I was acting on behalf of the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) against the government, which, as we saw it, was taking too long to phase in parental leave under a European Union directive. Cartoonists went to town on the theme of Blair v. Blair. The hearing took place in the Lord Chief Justice’s court, and as I stood up, the Lord Chief Justice said, “In the circumstances, Ms. Booth, would you like to sit down?” I replied, “Thank you, but I’m better on my feet.”
I was, but he was right to ask: I was vast. I had been expecting the baby to come early — none of my other three having made forty weeks — and toward the end I was sleeping badly. I would get up, leaving Tony in bed, go next door into what would become the nursery, and sit in a rocking chair we had just bought. There, with the lights off, I would rock gently, looking out the window. At the back of the building, outside the back gate, I could see a photographer from the Daily Mail, waiting. The photographers came in shifts, day in, day out, for three weeks. I had this horror that when I went into labor, this photographer would burst in and take pictures. I thought, I don’t want to bring this baby into the world with the Mail peering into my room. Why can’t I have this baby in private?
Since the beginning, the Mail had been at the forefront of every negative story going. If an unflattering photograph came its way, the editors would print it. That March the Mail had been approached by somebody notorious in the publishing world who was offering the manuscript of a memoir written by our former nanny Ros Mark. The paper must have known that I would fight this tooth and nail, and the result was Blair v. Associated Newspapers, which the paper lost. Ros had been naive, but the Daily Mail didn’t have that excuse.
The first we knew about the story was when Ros rang us in a panic. The Mail was outside the house in Lancaster where she was living as a student. The paper was trying to get an interview, she said. At this point we knew nothing about a book. We simply thought she was being harassed by the press, who’d found out about her connection with the Blairs. She didn’t know what to do, so I suggested she ring Alastair. He in turn rang the Mail and asked what the hell they thought they were doing, harassing our former nanny. The Mail told him that she had written a memoir and was trying to sell it. The paper had been sent extracts, the spokesperson said.
We were astonished. Everybody, including Tony and Alastair. We all knew Ros so well. She was a sweet, sporty girl who had a lot of love in her, which she had given freely to the children. She had been with us for four years, and it was hard to imagine how we would have coped with the transition from Richmond Crescent to Downing Street without her. By now Alastair was in touch with the literary agent who had approached the Mail, who implied, Alastair said, that Ros herself wasn’t the prime mover, but that her mother and brother were involved. Ros, it would seem, had simply provided the anecdotes and the details: the day-to-day life of a nanny in a chaotic but otherwise totally ordinary family that found itself in extraordinary circumstances.
In many ways it was a very warm depiction, but quite unpublishable as a book. From Tony’s and my point of view, it risked being at worst embarrassing. But in terms of our kids, it was impossible. No matter who you are, you cannot write about children in that way — their personal habits, tantrums, foibles, and illnesses, their quirky ways — no matter how lovingly recounted. It was a total invasion of their privacy.
As an employment lawyer, I had always had proper contracts with my nannies, all of which included a confidentiality agreement. In fact, when Tony became Leader of the Opposition, I had even had Ros sign another one, just to tie things up.
I spoke to the government’s legal department, which said it was a private matter. I then got on to my old friend Val Davies, now a partner in a big City firm, and asked her to take out an injunction, which she did.
That Sunday the Mail ran a couple of paragraphs: nothing about the children — I’m not surprised, as it was all very domestic stuff — but an unguarded remark by Bill Clinton that Ros had overheard, and a couple of comments about different people who had come to stay in Downing Street.
We weren’t able to stop the press reports — the fact that the Blairs’ nanny had written a book — but everything concerning the manuscript had to be handed over to us, and the Mail was ordered to pay our court costs. We were also awarded costs against Ros, but I chose not to enforce them. It should really have ended there, but by this time Ros had become involved with a woman, whom the papers would later describe as a “fantasist,” who tried to sell the manuscript elsewhere, in spite of the terms of the injunction. Extraordinary allegations started coming out. I then had to start taking out gag orders against this woman as well. It was a complete nightmare.
The baby was due on May 23, but on the morning of the nineteenth, I knew that labor had started. Always one for putting off the trip to the hospital until the last possible minute, I decided to do just one more thing. As Euan was taking his GCSEs, the headmaster had suggested that I come in to discuss how best to ensure that the press didn’t get hold of his grades. Needless to say, we were followed, but Robbie, one of Tony’s drivers, did a quick U-turn in Victoria Street and managed to lose them. Jackie came with me, as she was intimately involved in anything to do with the children’s schools. Fiona came, too, as this was connected to the press.
My contractions were getting stronger. Little does he realize, I thought as I listened to the headmaster, that as we sit here discussing how to keep my son’s GCSEs out of the tabloids, I’m about to give birth in his office.
When we were finished, I was so terrified about the press finding out, I refused to tell the hospital we were on our way. So Robbie just drove round the back, and we snuck in. I was taken straight into one of the delivery suites. Then there was the question of Tony. Obviously, the moment he arrived, the press would know what was happening. In fact, they had got wind of it anyway, and they were all gathering outside. When I found out, my contractions stopped immediately. Even the thought of that phalanx of photographers was enough to freeze me.
Sally Benatar, the only woman on Tony’s protection team, had by now arrived, and she and Fiona waited outside as labor got well and truly under way. My other deliveries had all been fairly quiet births, but I made up for that with Leo! I remember the nursing staff saying that I didn’t have to worry about how much noise I made because the room was soundproof. “No one will hear anything,” they claimed. Only later did I realize that the room wasn’t that soundproof, and poor Sally, who was in the early stages of her first pregnancy, was deeply regretting having volunteered to be present.
At around eight Tony said he couldn’t wait any longer and came over. The ’tecs all put their heads round the door to say hello, and every one of them looked as if he was going to be sick. Leo was by far the longest of my four births. I think part of me was holding on because I was still terrified of being photographed. It was stupid, really, but when you’re pregnant, you get these fixations, and I just thought, I do not want to be photographed looking like that. Giving birth is very private. You think you’re ugly and the whole thing is horrendous. You think, I don’t want my husband to see me like this, let alone the entire world. In the end, of course, you don’t give a damn.
From Tony’s point of view, it was the best birth, because it was entirely natural. Euan’s was scary, as they had to use forceps. Kathryn’s was scary, because I was being cut open. And Nicholas’s — the only one that had been calm and natural — Tony had missed completely. I refused any drugs because my aim was to get out with the baby in complete privacy, and that meant as soon as possible.
Leo was born just after midnight, and at a few minutes after 2:00 a.m., I walked to the waiting car, the baby in my arms and Tony by my side. That was that. No one expected me to be released that night. The boys were waiting up for us — Kathryn was staying with a friend — and my mum was there to help. All was well with the world. As I fed my new baby for the first time, I felt totally safe. I was in my own bed, in my own home, and no one was going to come running through the door and snatch a picture.
We knew that there was a hunger for photographs, so I had asked Mary McCartney if she would come and take them. I had got to know her through Breast Cancer Care, her mother, Linda, having died of breast cancer. We decided we’d sell the images and give the proceeds to the charity. So the next day — shades of when Euan was born — André came in to make me look presentable. Mary took the photographs: one for the press and one with all the kids for us. Unfortunately they’d been up so late the night before that they were horribly badly behaved. Nicholas ended up with a bruised eye, thanks to Euan, and my mother was in tears.