Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair.Ryan Enn Hughes For The Globe and Mail
I had always assumed that first ladies, even former ones, were somehow more together than the rest of us. Then I met Cherie Blair. It turns out I was wrong.
Ms. Blair, 56, is lovely and breathless when we meet on Monday night in the plush suite of a hotel in Toronto's Yorkville area. She is a glittering vision in a midnight-blue embroidered jacket, diamonds and gold.
She is also a bit of a disaster. She is running late for a dinner in the ballroom downstairs, where she will launch the Canadian chapter of the Loomba Trust, one of the global charities over which she presides. The trust supports widows and their children in the developing world.
Her plane was delayed and she has barely had time to unpack. A makeup artist stews in the corner, wielding brushes like weapons. A photographer hovers. An assistant floats above everything, clutching a glass of mineral water. Ms. Blair takes a long sip and sits down. We have less than 20 minutes.
Ms. Blair, as it turns out, isn't just having a bad day. This is who she is. She is notoriously late, a habit, she says, that dates back to her grammar-school days, when she held the record for tardiness.
Just last week, she was overdue for a speaking engagement in front of 20,000 schoolchildren. "I ended up having had my makeup done in the car. The makeup artist nearly stabbed me with the eyeliner," she says woefully.
She also tends to misspeak. At a breakfast speech the following morning to a group of prominent Canadian businesswomen, sponsored in part by this newspaper, she thanked the "Mail and Globe" for its generous support.
The British press, of course, had a 10-year-long field day with Ms. Blair, starting the morning after Tony Blair's Labour Party celebrated its hard-fought victory in 1997. Then an ambitious human-rights lawyer and part-time judge, she unwittingly answered a knock at the door dressed in unfortunate thigh-high grey pyjamas, undone hair and last night's makeup. The pictures still haunt her.
Her verbal gaffes, property deals, lecture tours, book contracts and fashion sense went on to propel her name into the headlines as much as her husband's. Most recently, controversy has swirled around everything from her purchase of another multimillion-pound home to the fact that her eldest son, a banker, earned a six-figure bonus.
Does she have any advice for Samantha Cameron, the wife of newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron? "Never answer the door in your nightie," she says. She is not laughing.
A few years out of Downing Street, however, Ms. Blair is older and wiser. She feels, finally, that she is free to speak. The press lashed out at her as an indirect way of attacking her husband, she believes. "[They]were my husband's political opponents, who didn't like me being a professional woman in my own right. … Certainly, for his political opponents, if they couldn't attack him, it was quite useful to attack me," she reflects.
"Now that's not to say that I didn't give them things that they could attack me for," she adds with a pause.
That's because one of Ms. Blair's most endearing qualities is also her Achilles heel: She is frank.
The daughter of peripatetic actors, she ascended in the most unlikely way to the world stage, an outspoken Labour loyalist from the wrong side of Liverpool. Her critics called her greedy for obsessing about money while her family was financially secure. Others ridiculed her fashion sense and her hair.
She saw herself as an unapologetic feminist, a busy working mother in her 40s juggling several balls while fending off considerable flak for refusing to quit her career when her husband became prime minister. "Lots of people were very surprised and thought, as the wife of the prime minister, you shouldn't have a career, which I think myself is a big mistake. I think it is quite important, otherwise you can be sucked into that whole maelstrom of politics," she says.
Curiously for a feminist, if not for a first lady, she claims never to have advised her husband on policy while he was prime minister. The claim is even more peculiar when you consider the fact that Ms. Blair, a whip-smart lawyer, had once run for office herself and helped to manage many of her husband's political campaigns.
However, when she speaks of the role of a first lady, she sounds downright traditional: "I think that policy in our system has to be made by people who are elected by other people, and that just because your husband's elected, it doesn't mean that you're elected. ...
"I think all of the spouses of the prime ministers see it as their role to support the prime minister in his job. It's not their role, really, to start lecturing about policy," she adds.
Not that Ms. Blair wasn't frustrated with the role she in many ways struggled to fulfill. She would never be a trophy wife or a politician in her own right, so where did that leave her?
"I was at an event in Toronto last week and there were pictures of Hillary Clinton and myself and Ms. [Michelle]Obama, and the organizers said, 'What do these three women have in common?' The reply came, 'They're all married to political leaders and they are all mothers.' But we were also lawyers," she says.
Ms. Blair tended to fight criticism by opening the door of No. 10 Downing St. even wider. While her husband was still in office, she wrote The Goldfish Bowl, a book about being a prime minister's wife, which some say compromised his position.
In 2008, her autobiography, Speaking for Myself, offered everything from her thoughts on contraception to a vivid description of when it failed and her youngest son, Leo, was conceived on a weekend visit with the Queen at Balmoral. ("I thought that story about Leo was actually quite funny," Ms. Blair says.)
Today, she spends much of her time on charity, with a focus on women in the developing world. Her chosen causes are noble, her speeches are still personal. At breakfast the other day, she told the story of a state visit to Russia, where, after dinner, Vladimir Putin invited her and Mr. Blair to go boar hunting at midnight.
Ms. Blair found herself traipsing around the countryside in a ball gown and a noisy pair of high heels, which her host worried would scare off their prey.
"Cherie, for God's sake, be quiet," Mr. Blair told her, but she couldn't.
She still can't. She tells the crowd that Mr. Putin's favourite line is, "Never praise a woman; it will only spoil her."
Ms. Blair, it seems, is still juggling. Between appearances in Toronto, she flew home so she could spend the weekend with Leo, now 10, in Europe. She probably won't have time to unpack before she leaves Toronto for New York. Her makeup artist fluffs her hair and dabs on lipstick. "You know how dark this is, so dab and rub," he instructs her, vowing to meet her again at 7 the next morning, before her assistant whisks her away.
Our 20 minutes are up.
Sonia Verma is a writer for The Globe and Mail.