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The secure telephone at 10 Downing Street was on Cherie Blair's side of the bed. After she had cooked dinner, loaded the dishwasher, read the kids their stories, reviewed her legal briefs and climbed into bed, she would sometimes be awoken, in the wee hours, by George W. Bush, who paid little heed to the five-hour time difference. Groggy and not entirely pleased, she would pass the receiver to her husband, and listen to half the conversation.

Despite this proximity to power, Cherie Blair never asked the leader whose pillow adjoined hers to do anything differently, she says. Only once, during her 10 years in the most public and controversial marriage in the history of British prime ministerships, did she ask her husband to say something to Mr. Bush on her behalf.

On that lone occasion, the subject was one that affected Ms. Blair both politically and professionally. By day, she was a human-rights lawyer, one of the founders of a respected left-wing practice. She was, by her account, more left-wing than her husband — his nickname for her was "my Bolshie scouser," after her mild Liverpudlian accent and her campaigning tendencies. She was also a devout Roman Catholic, a faith that would later become more influential on her character, and possibly her husband's, than anything ideological.

Shortly after Mr. Bush's election, which both Blairs initially found heartbreaking, the President seemed poised to withdraw the United States from the International Criminal Court, cutting the most influential country in the world away from most forms of international-rights law.

Ms. Blair asked her husband to press the case for her the next time he met Mr. Bush in Crawford, Tex. He answered abruptly: "Don't fuss, woman," he said. "I've got important things to do."

Next, on a family visit to Crawford, she tried to bring the matter up with the President personally, an awkward moment that infuriated Mr. Blair, mystified Mr. Bush (who had never heard of the court) and failed to stop the U.S. from withdrawing.

It was a fulcrum moment: Afterward, both the Blairs seemed to resign themselves to an acquiescent relationship with the Bush administration.

It was also the moment, it seems, when Cherie Blair became inured to her lack of anything like a Hillary Clinton role, and abandoned any effort to change her husband's politics.

"I cannot say, with hand on heart, that absolutely 100 per cent of everything my husband did, every day, I 100 per cent agreed with, that's for sure," she tells me, placing her hand on my wrist. "But in the end, it's for him to take those decisions; he's the elected one."

Quietly, she adds, as a hasty afterthought: "There were days when that was frustrating."

Now, after a decade of enforced silence, Cherie Blair is free to speak, and she spent an hour with me this week on a sofa in a west-end London office, in her only North American interview to date, pouring her heart out in a conversation that seemed like a cathartic experience as much as an effort to draw attention to a memoir.

For a woman who has spent her life being ridiculed for her awkward fashion sense — and then for her obsessive, ill-advised attempts to overcome it — she is tasteful and subdued nowadays, dressed in a well-fitted brown knit dress and white patent-leather shoes with square toes, a look befitting a senior Queen's Counsel (QC). At 53, she no longer resembles her caricature, in appearance or tone, even if the old obsessions are still there.

She has spent the week at the crest of a storm of criticism over her soon-to-be-published memoirs. Sections leaked to the press have caused a top judge to call for her resignation as a QC and Prime Minister Gordon Brown — whose office was beneath the Blairs' flat at 11 Downing Street during those 10 years — to devote a press conference to dismissing the book's account of the two families' icy, often hateful relationship.

Ms. Blair tells me repeatedly that it was meant to be an apolitical book, the story of a poor child of itinerant actors who climbed to the heights of the world stage while managing a large family and a difficult career.

But she certainly must have expected its political consequences.

Mr. Brown's friends and advisers have repeatedly made it known that the Prime Minister considers Ms. Blair to be the Lady Macbeth who persuaded Tony Blair to stay in office and slay Mr. Brown's leadership aspirations until 2007 — an act that, depending on which side you take, either doomed him to failure by keeping him out of office until the worst possible moment or saved Britain a far worse disaster by keeping a brilliant but politically incompetent man away from the reins for a few extra years.

While Ms. Blair, ever the barrister, pleads innocent and tells me repeatedly that she has no hard feelings, this is one of the many occasions where her own memoir ends up contradicting her: Over and over in its pages, Mr. Brown appears as a grave and distant menace, a pretender "rattling the keys," a busybody who micromanages everything up to and including which bedrooms their family can claim above his head.

"It wasn't really personal," she tells me, not entirely convincingly. "Gordon and Tony were together the architects of New Labour. And therefore it certainly wasn't a political divide. But then, as Tony's wife, I'm his biggest supporter. And insofar as in being a Tony supporter it put me in opposition to Gordon, that had to happen. And it isn't because I don't like Gordon, and it isn't because I think he isn't a good politician, because he's an excellent politician. It's more that I just put my husband first. And I'm sure Sarah Brown puts her husband first."

Her Hillary complex

Gordon Brown is not the biggest puzzle, though, in the drama of Cherie Blair. Nor is George W. Bush. No, that puzzle centres around Hillary Clinton, or at least around Ms. Blair's relationship with her American alter ego. You could argue that the point at which these two very similar women diverged was the point at which everything went wrong for the Blairs.

When they moved into 10 Downing Street in 1997, amid an unprecedented national love-in, the Blairs had already known the Clintons for three years. Mr. Blair's New Labour had been modelled after president Bill Clinton's efforts to combine economic prosperity with social justice, and Mr. and Ms. Blair had paid several visits to Mr. and Ms. Clinton by then.

Between the wives, the parallels were striking: Both were successful lawyers from humble backgrounds with superb educations and real political savvy; both were socially awkward and given to unguarded remarks.

But from Inauguration Day in 1993, Hillary Clinton was part of a political partnership, taking roles that involved drafting policy and representing the country (though perhaps not as much or as effectively as she has claimed in her presidential-campaign speeches this year).

It's fair to say Cherie Blair was even more qualified: She had been a politician herself, running for Labour in one election and taking major roles in many other campaigns. Many voters fully expected another two-hander to emerge, a husband-and-wife dynasty.

Nothing of the sort occurred. Ms. Blair, denied a role or a staff, in effect found herself

barefoot (and, twice before they left office, pregnant) in the kitchen.

This betrayal of ambition is the grand motif of her 500-page memoir: Upon arrival at Downing Street, she compares herself to the narrator in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, disdained by a staff who will not grant her any authority. And from then on, she finds herself shunted aside.

"While our embassies abroad would find that I was useful, once back in Blighty, I was surplus to requirements," she writes. And then: "I was entering a system which seemed to proclaim, 'You are a non-person except in so far as you are an appendage to the PM.'" Followed by: "Number 10 was still coming to grips with the fact that I could walk and talk. The system was simply not geared to a prime minister's spouse who wanted to be involved." And, finally: "The office was terrified I might turn into Hillary Clinton."

But there's a problem with her analysis. All those people who were holding her back — variously described as "the office" or "Number 10" or as specific well-known staff members — were either direct employees of the Prime Minister or deeply beholden to him. In other words, Cherie Blair's difficulty with "the system" can only really be seen as a problem with her husband: If he had wanted her to play a larger role, then she certainly would have.

I press her on this point, but she will not see it this way. Faith, both religious and marital, is such a powerful force in Cherie Blair's imagination that the possibility of having been undone by her husband is outside its contemplation.

"I was frustrated by the lack of a support system," she says. "The thing about it that's interesting [is] … the system was actually a very old-fashioned system, and they just assumed that the prime minister came along with a wife who was not a working wife — who was still the kind of wife that Lady Clarissa Eden was," she says, referring to the noblewoman spouse of 1950s prime minister Anthony Eden.

The Blairs were the first couple to have babies born at Downing Street — four young children by the end of their term. And they were the first not to send their children to boarding school, so Downing Street became almost a laboratory for that modern puzzle known as the work-life balance.

"I wasn't sure, actually, how much role there was for me. And I was still very much of the view that my role would be to be the lawyer [and] to stay with my family," she says. "But I certainly didn't think that I'd be able to do anything political, like Hillary's role."

Again, not entirely persuasive: Ms. Blair, the crusading lawyer and Labour stalwart, accompanied her husband on all his foreign visits, and chafed against the floral-arrangement, coffee-pouring image of first ladies (though she admonishes, "I wasn't a first lady — Prince Philip is our first lady").

It wasn't capital-P politics, but it was political — even if it had no definition, no salary, no staff. It was that lack of a defined role that proved Cherie Blair's undoing, probably more so than her own mercurial personality.

Embarrassing entourage

In 2002, just as the Iraq war was looming and after a miscarriage (see excerpt at right) and other domestic difficulties, Ms. Blair found herself embroiled in a scandal that came to be known as "Cheriegate."

A decade before, she had befriended an American woman named Carole Caplin, who offered weight-loss and ward-robe advice through a firm she called Holistix. After the election, Ms. Caplin, along with a campy hairdresser named Andre, became Cherie Blair's permanent entourage — comforting companions who kept her confidence up, gave her fashion advice that she appreciated and the rest of the world abhorred, immersed her in various crystal-besotted New Age cures and made a lot of money off her.

In 2002, Ms. Caplin talked Ms. Blair into withdrawing a couple of hundred thousand pounds from the blind trust in which the Blairs kept their savings (British politicians not being allowed to invest) and use it to buy two properties in Bristol, ostensibly for Ms. Blair's son Euan's university digs. The "property investor" turned out to be a convicted con artist named Peter Foster. Ms. Blair ended up apologizing profusely for a scandal that, while not illegal, put her in a deeply flaky light. She dumped her dodgy friend, but far too late.

This, I point out, seems to be a consequence of her ambiguous position: Not having a staff or a job, she delegated things to the only people she had at hand, who were far from professional.

To my surprise, Ms. Blair blames nobody but herself. "Looking back, I think, 'How could I have been so stupid?'" she says.

"Remember, I had just had a miscarriage. Which had affected me. And then my eldest son, my baby, was leaving home … my poor son who, at age 16, got drunk after his exams, which is not really all that unusual, and made the front page for days for it, that was hard. … That emotional vulnerability was there as well.

"And then the whole thing with Carole came, and she herself became pregnant [by Mr. Foster] and had a miscarriage, and having just had a miscarriage myself, the idea that I would turn my back on her when she was at the centre of the storm and just had a baby … Maybe if I'd been a harder creature I could have done that, but I couldn't."

By this point, her other American friend, Ms. Clinton, had become a senator. Whether Ms. Blair's foibles were entirely the fault of her character, or a consequence of her peculiar role, it's pretty clear that they wouldn't have occurred if her husband hadn't become the leader of Britain.

Clashing agendas

But this is exactly where the strange dilemma of Cherie Blair's loyalty becomes most troubling. For her career was not in some neutral corner of the law; she was a senior partner in a crusading firm that fought the government aggressively on human-rights matters. Over and over, her work in court ended up colliding with her husband's political agenda.

At one point, in 2000, when she was nine months pregnant with their fourth child, Leo, she found herself in court representing Britain's trade unions, suing the government for its failure to fully enforce its law providing for three months' paid maternity leave.

There were plenty of other such occasions, involving Labour Party laws that were cruel to refugees and tough-on-crime laws that threw hundreds of women into inhumane prisons, a topic of special concern to Ms. Blair. Few of these matters made it into her memoir. Did she try to influence her husband to change things that she morally disagreed with?

"The sad thing about it is that my legal triumphs and things like that weren't high on his list of priorities," she concedes, mentioning the maternity-leave case, which became known as Blair v. Blair.

"Did Tony ever even talk about it with me? No. My nanny and my kids, they were quite interested in my cases, but Tony always had bigger issues to worry about. … Once he was prime minister, I would make speeches about women in prison. … He would pay attention or he wouldn't, and in the end the choice was his."

While they shared left-wing beliefs, Mr. Blair's strategy differed sharply from his wife's. He and his New Labour staff realized, early on, that in order to stay in power they would have to court the angry middle-class voters who became known to insiders as "Daily Mail readers," after the right-wing tabloid with a four-million-strong readership. That ambition, and the policies that came with it, often led one Blair to collide with the other — in human-rights cases, and also in the pages of the Daily Mail itself, which led the press campaign against Cherie Blair.

"The one thing that brought Tony and me together was our interest in politics, and our interest in religion," she tells me.

In the end, even if she refuses to see it that way, Mr. Blair's political boom ended up coming down on his wife. That left the faith, and he ended up following his wife deeper into Catholicism — perhaps to find an answer to their deep political dilemma.

"There were bad times. Of course there were bad times," she says, and later summarizes her odyssey as a distinctly Catholic experience: "But it's not all about confession — it's about forgiveness. And God will always give us a second chance."

Doug Saunders is a London-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.