While her husband was British prime minister, Cherie Blair stayed silent on foreign policy and tailored her stellar legal career to run her household. So why is she so unpopular? asks Kathy Sheridan.
SHE SETTLES IN on the sofa, prettier, thinner, more elegant than her photographs allow, with her immaculate flicked-out hair, light summer dress, wedge sandals built for comfort, a chaotic handbag (she shows the contents, mostly unused rag-ends of Post-it packs) and barely-there make-up. Then again, she says, people always say that when they meet her. In fact, they say two things: "One is that I look much better in the flesh and two, 'you're not at all what we expected'."
It was the persistence of that second comment, she insists, that cemented her decision to write the book - we leave aside the reported £1 million (€1.25 million) fee - and lay herself out for a media flaying.
So what do people expect when they meet her? "If they read the Daily Mail, some kind of creature with horns, and slightly mad", she shrugs - "who's going to steal their purse", I add, at which she bursts out laughing.
She is the working-class Liverpool lass who was abandoned by her star-struck, hard-drinking philandering father and saw her glamorous Rada-trained mother work in a chippie to make ends meet; she is the fiercely-bright woman who turned down Oxford for financial reasons, yet managed to break into the overwhelmingly white male culture of the English bar to become a stellar human-rights lawyer and queen's counsel. But Cherie Blair inhabits a world where her looks remain her defining trait.
One reviewer writes of a "rank, rumbling misogyny at work in the nation's attitude". An elderly man who noticed the book on the reviewer's lap, offered that he had "always hated that woman". Why? "She's got a horrible mouth." This week, a pleasant London taxi driver (son of a Navan immigrant) repeated that verdict, almost word for word, to me. If Cherie Blair had pimped out her four children in a Downing St cellar for 10 years, the response to her could not be more vituperative.
Does she perceive certain parallels between public attitudes to Hillary Clinton and herself? "I do . . . What in a man is seen as a positive, in a woman is seen as aggressive, unpleasant and unnatural. And yet, Hillary has absolutely broken the mould. What she demonstrated was her ability to do the job, particularly the way she withstood that pressure."
Perhaps. But it could also be argued that women have regressed 30 years. In fact, the coruscation of Hillary Clinton - of her looks, her age, her gender ("iron my shirts") - raises the question of whether the US as a whole is ready to elect any woman.
"It's almost like they can't cope with women doing a real job," says Blair. "Therefore, instead of assessing them on the job-based criteria, we talk about these fuzzy things that don't really matter."
At the bar, at least, the wigs and gowns made everyone look "odd", so a barrister's performance was not about appearance, she notes. "Then suddenly my husband becomes prime minister and because it's not my job to speak - I'm not the one who is elected so it's not appropriate for me to speak - everything becomes about what you look like. It's not that I didn't care about it or that I'm not interested in clothes, but it wasn't something I needed to concentrate on."
She had three children, then famously a fourth, at 45; a legal career "which I desperately wanted to keep going and which no one else can do for you . . . But what somebody else could do to help was by going round and buying the tights and at least say, 'well, here's three dresses that might be suitable, try 'em on at home and see which one you like and I'll take the other two back' - and that's where Carole came in." That would be Carole Caplin, her style adviser; the Caplin of the alleged dabbling with crystals and toe-clippings and over-long massages and con-artist boyfriend. Blair remains staunchly loyal: "All this fuss about Carole was silly - she did a good service to me and she did it because she was a friend and also because she was my trainer. One thing I did say, she kept me so thin . . . She was quite fierce as a trainer."
IN ANY EVENT, the woman who went into Downing St without a single hat came out with 15, "including a black hat for winter funerals and a black straw hat for summer funerals and memorial services. Most people don't have to do things like that". In other words, she did what was required of her and more, in a system designed for a PM with a non-working wife or prepared to pay a housekeeper out of his private funds. It was Cherie who paid for the nanny who peeled the potatoes for dinner. It was also Cherie who cooked dinner, cleaned up, read the kids their stories, and had the secure telephone on her side of the bed when George Bush ignored the five-hour time difference and rang her husband in the early hours. And while you would never guess it from the media coverage over 10 years, she also kept the vow of silence - she never spoke to a political journalist in all that time and only to others about the charities she promoted - and dutifully tailored her high-flown court appearances to the demands of an ill-defined, unpaid, uniquely demanding "job".
Her adoration of her husband is palpable, yet throughout the book, there is an undeniable thread of loneliness, a sense of ambition sacrificed and betrayed, dismissed by her husband on the one occasion when she asked him to intercede with Bush about the US's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. "Don't fuss, woman. I've got important things to do," responded her husband.
After advice from the foreign office, she tried herself, when next sitting beside Bush, who - surprise, surprise - had never heard of it. In the end, she only succeeded in infuriating her husband. "The sad thing is that my legal triumphs and things like that weren't high on his list of priorities."
Meanwhile, the Downing St mandarins were terrified that she was going to turn into Hillary. This woman, self-employed, accustomed to advising clients on the most complex legal arguments, suddenly found "that all sorts of other people had opinions about what I must do. Or what I should and should not do, and kind of told me I couldn't have the opinion myself because it wasn't my place to have an opinion because the overall strategy was set for something bigger than me - which is absolutely true, of course."
Would Tony have been equally accommodating if she had won the seat she contested in the 1980s and the positions had been reversed? She grins wryly. "Tony as candidate's husband? Mmmh, it was not his greatest moment. I'm not sure that Bill [ Clinton] was great at it either. It's quite difficult to be a 'first lady' and people don't realise that . . . Martin McAleese is a very nice man and does that role very well," she says, brushing past his relationship-building work with prominent Northern loyalists. "But what he doesn't do and is not expected to do is quite the amount he would do if he were a woman." The other example, of course, is Denis Thatcher, who - she does not say - played a humungous amount of golf. The expectation simply was not there.
Alpha males of the Blair era such as Prescott, Campbell, Levy and Powell have all cashed in on their political office. Yet, she alone has been portrayed as a vulgar, undignified, greedy, grasping, witch-like Lady Macbeth.
As one of her few female media defenders pointed out in the London Times, John Major, who works for the Carlyle Group, promoters of the arms trade, receives less opprobrium than an ex-PM's wife who speaks unpaid on human rights.
She seems genuinely taken aback that people took such umbrage at her story of Leo's conception - in the queen's Balmoral residence, when she had left her contraception "equipment" at home out of embarrassment. For one thing, she thought she was "past it" (her fertility) but worse than that, on a previous visit to Balmoral, she discovered that the lady's maid unpacked all her luggage. Mortifyingly, the maid had even cleaned the "gunge" from the bottom of her toiletry bag. Cherie Blair's grandmother had been a cleaner, "and somehow they're not equal people. So when people look after me, there's a part of me, [ that thinks] it could have been my grandma". So she left the embarrassing "equipment" at home.
What she imagined to be a funny story - and a warning to other women who felt they were "past it" - was greeted with a communal quiver of distaste by the exquisitely refined denizens of the media, who also fretted about the resulting child Leo's psychological state once he discovered that he was an "accident". "We don't go round giving sex demonstrations in our house," she responds mildly, "but on the other hand, I do think that you need to talk honestly and openly to children about reproduction. I will have the same relationship with Leo as I have with his older siblings."
Family is clearly of primary importance. She applied for Irish passports for her children, to honour their grandmother, Hazel (Tony's mother), who was born in Co Donegal. "You can see it in Katherine's [ her daughter's] red hair," she says.
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Speaking for Myself, by Cherie Blair is published by Little, Brown, £18.99.