The Times interview with Cherie Blair | Speaking for Myself: book extract (part 1) | Book extract (part 2)

Cherie Blair was astonished by the ruthless manner in which her husband made public within hours the fact that she had lost the baby she was carrying.

In her autobiography, serialised in The Times today, she reveals that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, insisted on informing the media almost immediately in 2002.

In an emotional account of losing her baby at the age of 47, she writes of her disbelief that her husband and Mr Campbell telephoned to discuss the announcement as she lay in pain and still bleeding. They did so in order that a delay in their holiday did not trigger false speculation of an early invasion of Iraq.

The truth about Tony and Gordon

Cherie Blair reveals her husband is advising Gordon Brown but says he did not trust him enough to stand down early

• 'The problem with me and Gordon is nothing personal'

• Cherie Blair: motherhood, makeovers and making ends meet – my life in Downing Street

• Cherie Blair: the secrecy and sadness behind a remarkable memoir

Multimedia

• Full coverage: Cherie Blair autobiography

BACKGROUND

• My complex life in Downing Street

• Secrecy and sadness behind memoir

• Leo: my miracle baby at 45 (and yes, he did have the MMR jab)

• The night I hated Tony

BACKGROUND

• Miscarriage: ‘I'm afraid the baby's dead, Mrs Blair'

• The Queen and I: relations with the royals

• Cherie Blair's face-off with Campbell over Caplin

• Peter Foster and the ‘scandal' that never was

Related Links

• Leo: my miracle baby at 45 (and yes, he did have the MMR jab)

• Miscarriage: ‘I'm afraid the baby's dead, Mrs Blair'

• The night I hated Tony

The former Prime Minister’s wife also reveals that she and her husband conceived their fourth child, Leo, while guests of the Queen at Balmoral. It happened because she had not packed her contraceptive equipment and because of the bitter cold, Mrs Blair says.

The astonishing disclosures are made in extracts from her book, Speaking for Myself.

They may cause some embarrassment within the Royal Household because Mrs Blair says that her decision not to pack her contraceptive equipment for the annual prime ministerial visit to Balmoral in 1999 was because the previous year all her belongings, including her toilet bag, had been unpacked.

The Blairs were guests at Balmoral on the weekend of September 4-5, 1999, and Leo was born on May 20, 2000.

Mrs Blair also reveals that Carole Caplin obtained a testing kit for her that confirmed the pregnancy and that Gordon Brown was one of the handful of people her husband insisted on telling because “the whole issue of my being a family man is very sensitive to him”.

Because of the timing of annual Balmoral visits, early in September, there has in the past been speculation over whether Leo could have been conceived there, but the Blairs have always refused to comment.

Mrs Blair writes about how she suspected that she might be pregnant in autumn 1999. “A few weeks before, we had been on the usual prime ministerial weekend to Balmoral. The first year we had actually stayed – in 1998 – I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but 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.”

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