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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.
Portrait of Cherie Blair. Ms. Blair is currently promoting her autobiography entitled ' Speaking for Myself.' (Randy Quan/The Globe and Mail)
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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.
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