NAIVE OR ARROGANT? GOOD Christian or Wicked Witch? Princess Diana or Lady
Macbeth? Cherie Blair’s persona is so unfathomable as to have perplexed most
commentators. How could such a devout Catholic be seduced by wacky
alternative therapies? How could such a competent professional woman be
taken in by a conman? And, most mysteriously, how could such a conscientious
churchgoer get caught in a self-made web of dissembling?
Nobody, even those close to her, can explain why Cherie did not own up to the
conference call she held with Carole Caplin and Peter Foster’s solicitors.
She had certainly been asked, last Wednesday evening, whether there was more
to come out. She said no. Had she genuinely forgotten the phone call? Or was
she being legalistic, seeing no reason to defend herself against a charge
that had not been made?
Her friends and colleagues — and probably even her husband — are completely
baffled by this omission. Blair has, for the first time, lost his normal
cool and is raging privately, in a way his staff have never seen before,
about the press and the effect it is having on his wife. She, meanwhile, is
crumbling under the pressure and the guilt. Downing Street is in turmoil.
And the one enemy that they all share is the Daily Mail. Had the
paper not been so unpleasant about Cherie’s looks in the first place, she
would never have felt the need to take on Caplin as her adviser. Now the
same newspaper has brought down the edifice it helped to create.
It was the Mail that first raised all the questions about Cherie’s
cranky interests and her far-out friends. But it has not sought to answer
them. Had it dug further, it might have realised that many of the clues lie
in the deeply religious aspects of Cherie’s upbringing.
You could, for instance, argue that the therapies she has espoused are not
incompatible with her faith but, literally in this case, complementary. The
state of holiness that Catholicism inspires has parallels in the state of
wholeness that holistic therapies promise. Both require faith and the
suspension of disbelief. Both use oils, water and incense to induce a sense
of mysticism. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. Carole Caplin scrubbed the
toxins from Cherie’s body. Cleansing and purification are important features
of both, and are particularly powerful symbols to people who have been
brought up to believe that they must be purged of sin.
And if Cherie’s priest has made her feel better about herself spiritually,
Caplin has made her feel better about herself physically. Here, too, there
are interconnections. The Catholic Church inculcates children with sexual
guilt that can last for the rest of their lives. Few adults who have had a
strict Catholic upbringing pursue a guilt-free sex life without a lot of
subsequent work. If Cherie’s work involved using Caplin to teach her
exercises to “release sexual energy”, she was trying only to ameliorate the
effects of years of guilt-laden Catholicism.
And Caplin seems to have succeeded in “healing” Cherie, in a physical sense at
least. The Prime Minister’s wife had never felt good about her appearance
until she met this guru. Before Blair became leader, she simply had not
bothered. In her youth she had been content with playing the role of the
clever daughter. Blair did not mind that she never wore make-up and took
little interest in her hair or clothes. It did not matter to either of them.
She was a loving wife and mother, she was intelligent, good company and
successful. That was enough.
Suddenly, though, it did matter, when John Smith died unexpectedly and the
couple were thrust unprepared into the limelight. Cherie, who had thought
foundation was something that underpinned a house, was expected to excel in
an area that she had always dismissed as frivolous, and in which she had no
knowledge or experience whatsoever. But she desperately did not want to let
her husband down.
She is not gifted with a good visual sense. It was clear from the Blairs’
house in Islington, for instance, that neither of them had much interest in
decor. Yet Cherie found herself under sustained attack for her appearance ,
most of all from the Mail. And the one thing she was good at — making
intellectual sense — was denied her, since Blair’s advisers were determined
that she should express no views of her own.
So Cherie had to shine without opening her mouth. And the woman who made her
shine, who transformed her from a slightly frumpy blue-stocking to a
passably beautiful consort, was Carole Caplin. The Prime Minister’s wife
began to wear stylish clothes, to have a hairstyle that really suited her,
to wear make-up to her best advantage. I would not be surprised if Caplin
told Cherie she was beautiful often enough for her to begin to believe it.
Unlike her husband, Cherie has never been a person who naturally feels
comfortable in her skin. Imagine the gratitude she would have towards
someone who helped her at last to feel good about herself. She had faith in
Caplin; and it was amply rewarded. So she would have been extremely
reluctant to question the appropriateness of having her as a friend.
She would also be reluctant to query the bona fides of her friend’s
boyfriend. Not only would she not have had the time, she would not even have
had the inclination. She is fiercely loyal, and that he was Caplin’s
boyfriend would have been recommendation enough.
Why, though, did Alastair Campbell and his partner, Fiona Millar, who works
for Cherie, not warn her that Foster was a conman? The answer is that they
had already fallen out over Caplin, her mother and their therapies. So
Cherie would have been loath either to tell them about the new boyfriend or
to take their advice.
Campbell and Millar lead very conventional lives, and are single-minded about
their beliefs and intolerant of those who dissent from them. Campbell, for
instance, is a vehement opponent of educational selection, and when the
Blairs sent Euan to the London Oratory School, he gave the Labour leader an
acidic lecture.
Not only would they dismiss alternative therapies, they would do it
aggressively. It is not hard to imagine Cherie becoming defensive about
Caplin and her circle, and to blame the Campbell/Millar hostility on a
prejudice against matters for which they had no sympathy or understanding.
And without their guidance, it is easy to see how Cherie fell for Foster’s
charm. Conmen are successful precisely because they are so good at
inveigling their way into people’s lives by spotting vulnerabilities and
playing to weaknesses. He could see that Cherie led a fantastically
complicated life, which she only just managed to hold together, and that
what she needed most was time-saving help. He could also see that she was by
nature trusting, forgiving and loyal to her friends. And he sensed her
financial insecurity. In his hands, this was a toxic mix, and he brought it
swiftly to the boil.
Many working mothers exude confidence and competence, while fearing inwardly
that their life is on the brink of collapse. The
childcare/home-running/school-organising/commuting/work matrix is as
precarious as a house of cards. Just one unwelcome gust — a nanny leaving, a
child ill, a house purchase to organise — can bring the whole structure
toppling down.
Cherie is no different. Her home life has always been chaotic, but the
stresses on her are greater than those on other working women. She has had
to add to the matrix a surprise new baby, official party and government
functions, charity work and — the most difficult to stomach — the pressures
of being in the public eye.
This last is what she finds hardest. She already knew how difficult it was to
be the child of a famous father, in her case the actor Tony Booth. The most
revealing public statement she has ever made — to one Fiona Millar, then a
freelance journalist writing in Today — was: “I started life as the
daughter of someone, now I am the wife of someone and I’ll probably end up as
the mother of someone.”
Because she has first-hand experience of famous parents, she is fantastically
protective of her children’s privacy. Indeed, when Blair agonised over
whether to stand for the leadership, the couple were more anxious about the
effect on their children than the terms of any agreement he might have had
with Gordon Brown. Although he had obviously thought about becoming Labour
leader before 1994, he had never expected it to happen so early. Their
children, then aged ten, 8 and 6, were far too young, the couple thought, to
be able to deal easily with the public pressures. That the original Mail story
concerned Euan was therefore the biggest reason for her to clam up.
But it also touched another raw nerve: the financial insecurity that often
haunts those with an impoverished childhood. To outsiders, Cherie looks like
a plutocratic, high-earning barrister. Inside, she probably feels that she
is only one disaster away from the poorhouse. She has been appointed
breadwinner of the family. Yet, as a self-employed lawyer, she is only as
good as her last brief. She has no employment security and no opportunity to
accumulate capital.
Having foolishly followed advice to sell their house in Islington, they have
no home beyond the little cottage in his constituency. Blair is blithely
sanguine about this, assuming that once he leaves Downing Street something
will turn up. But it has made Cherie deeply insecure.
Buying the Bristol flats was a way of remedying this problem. It was not just
a cold-hearted property speculation, but a more complicated emotional
response to the transient existence that she felt she led. Doubtless Peter
Foster sensed this vulnerability and played on it.
Finally, he knew that Cherie was stubbornly loyal to her friends, thanks
partly to her Christianity. Despite the reservations of practically everyone
who worked in Downing Street, she had stood by Caplin. Now Caplin was going
to have Foster’s baby. Whether or not Cherie had doubts about Foster’s
suitability, she knew that Caplin needed a partner and the baby a father.
That Caplin lost the baby just after the story broke has made Cherie feel
incredibly guilty — something at which Catholics excel. She blames herself
for the loss of the child and she knows how painful miscarriages are, having
suffered one herself in the summer. She blames herself for the trouble she
has caused her husband. And she blames herself for the embarrassment she has
caused her children. That Foster is the real culprit will not lessen her
guilt.
And so to the biggest question: why the cover-up? The fact that the newspaper
concerned was the Mail played a huge part. She believes, with good
reason, that the Mail has run a personal vendetta against her for
years. It bitches about her looks, her views, her foibles. It even ran a
poisonous piece suggesting that the Blairs had made her miscarriage public
in order to compete in the sympathy stakes with the Browns. How hurtful is
that?
Most of the allegations in the original Mail story suggested
impropriety on Cherie’s part, which she protests were completely false. Why
then, she asked, should she open up her private affairs, intruding on her
and her children’s privacy, when she had done nothing wrong? She was acutely
embarrassed about having been taken in by a conman, but that was her
problem, not the nation’s. The embarrassment added to her reluctance to be
candid.
At the beginning, when Cherie felt forced to hire Caplin, and at the end, the
newspaper’s goading has had the desired effect. If it wanted to destroy the
Prime Minister’s wife, it has succeeded. Whether she deserved to be
destroyed in such a pitiless fashion is another matter.
