It started on the morning after Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997. His wife, Cherie Booth, was photographed answering the door to a delivery of flowers at their home in north London. She was still in her nightie and looked half asleep, having arrived home from Labour’s victory party on the South Bank just a couple of hours earlier. Any thought of staying in their house in Islington vanished, she said later, and the couple moved to Number 10 that weekend.
It is hard to recall now, when we are used to seeing women with careers and children in Downing Street, what a break with tradition Booth represented. Blair replaced John Major, the quintessential grey man, whose wife Norma was described on the prime minister’s official website as providing ‘sterling support’ to her husband. As for the wives of previous Labour prime ministers, all been born before or during the First World War. The world had changed radically between the birth of Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, in 1916 and Cherie Booth in 1954, and nowhere more so than in relation to the role of women.
Booth is a baby boomer, belonging to the post-war generation that challenged class barriers, sent millions of working-class kids to university for the first time and embraced feminism. She was already a QC when she moved into Number 10 and it soon became clear that the Downing Street press operation was struggling to handle media interest; at one low point, it even issued a press release explaining Booth’s recent weight loss. Every aspect of her appearance was commented on, an affront to any woman who wanted to be known for her professional achievements. But Booth seemed particularly uncomfortable in her own skin.
I knew Booth slightly, having met her and Tony Blair at a dinner party when we all lived in Hackney a few years earlier. Blair had not yet become party leader but he was on the shadow front bench and one of Labour’s rising stars. Booth was born in Lancashire, one of actor Tony Booth’s eight children by five different women; he left her mother, Gale Smith, when his daughter was eight. She has talked about the struggle her mother faced, bringing up two children on her own in Sefton, just north of Liverpool. The class difference between Booth and Blair struck me at once; he displayed the easy charm of a public schoolboy but she was less at ease, almost as though she expected to have to deflect criticism. I also thought she was in the difficult position of being married to a man who would be perceived by much of the world as the more attractive of the couple.
The next day, I got a call from our mutual friend: “Tony wanted you to know that everything he said last night was off the record.” I said it had been an unmemorable evening, with the exception of a slightly baffling conversation about how many members of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay. Years later, one of the other guests remarked that she had never met Blair or Booth when she lived in Hackney. She was astonished when I reminded her that she had once spent an entire evening with them.
I ran into Booth shortly before the 1997 election at a party thrown by my then publisher. There was a buzz in the room, created by the knowledge that the guest of honour was married to the man who was about to become prime minister. But the contradictions were already evident; to my generation of feminists, being known as someone’s wife was not something to celebrate. The discomfort I felt was underscored when I had a short conversation with Booth, who knew I now lived in west London. She mentioned Chiswick Women’s Aid, the famous refuge founded by Erin Pizzey, and suggested I should visit the residents. “They’d love a visit from a local author,” she told me. I winced, feeling like a character in a Jane Austen novel.
When the doorstep photo was published the weekend after the election, Booth hated it. Almost 20 years later, in 2015, she told the Guardian that “I look back at this picture and feel mortified”, even though other people thought it was “very human”. “I was very upset when the press said I was wearing some sort of nylon thing; it was a high-quality, cotton nightie from Next and I bought it especially for the campaign… It was a lot better than you might expect from a mother of three.”
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Subscribe“Should we feel any sympathy for New Labour’s First Lady?”
Nope. The sub heading (which may not have been the author’s) reveals a modern mindset which assumes people are bundled along by their unreflective choices and therefore victims worthy of sympathy.
Older generations are fonder of older sayings, like “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”
I notice a tendency for main stream columnists to resort to Unherd. I presume that this is because their own organs are failing. As I am not willing to subscribe to the newspapers that they work for, why do they presume that I will pay to read them here? Perhaps “Unherd” should be renamed “Itsmeagain”
Unherd has changed for the worse. Its edge is disappearing and it increasingly looks like yet another mainstream journal of pop culture. So sad. I used to be its number one fan.
I was thinking that myself! I think I prefer the online “Spiked” as it has the edge.
I don’t know about Joan Smith, but some of them seem to be refugees from wokified legacy media.
Indeed.
If Suzanne Moore had abandoned The Guardian before her colleagues turned on her, I wouldn’t regard her with such scorn.
What’s this piece of bitchy gossip doing on UnHerd?
Another mean girl piece. And these writers have the gall to squeeze in “misogyny” every single time.
No wonder CBQC gave the impression that she was uncomfortable fraternising with the media class when confronted with such snobbery that drips from this article. ‘Wincing’ being asked to go and speak to a local charity – how uncouth!
Have I woken up in 1997? How is this relevant now? At risk of being called churlish for pointing it out, the First Lady of this country is Her Majesty the Queen, no matter how differently New Labour or anyone else desire it to be otherwise.
Excusing someone’s poor decisions or behaviour because of the class they were born into is just condescending.
Rather worrying that a woman of such repeated poor judgement is a QC and sits in judgement upon others.
Gosh somebody got a hatchet for their Birthday.
I find it exceedingly hard to summon up any sympathy for a person who chose the legal profession as a career, it seems to be first choice of self-obsessed, entitled charlatans and hasn’t she done well at it !
She married another charlatan.
You have to admit that she knew her strengths
‘Cherie Blair QC’, as suggested by Downing St, was rejected by Cherie who pointed out that she used her maiden name in her legal career and that no barrister named ‘Cherie Blair’ was licensed to practise at the Bar. She won that one. And when Alistair Campbell ordered her to repay shops for dresses she’d bought at a discount she sent him packing. ‘Show me the law that says I must.’ No answer to that.
‘The Mirror reported that Booth helped herself to 68 items, enough to fill five boxes, and left staff at the Melbourne store open-mouthed’
I wonder if there isn’t another side to this story – maybe the owner of the shop kept encouraging her to take more or something. Maybe it’s true but it seems an odd thing to do by someone so much in the public eye st the time
This sort of article is not why I subscribe to Unherd.
No mention of how Cherie Booth became Cherie Blair in the US, when she went to cash in their cheque for selling out British foreign policy.
fascinating stuff. The author’s fierce ‘radical feminism’ shines through as she makes a few pointlessly catty remarks about former PM’s wife. That’s one problem with ‘radical feminism’ I suppose – it distracts from the extent that women are demeaned by intra-sex conflict/ competition/ jealousy, rather than by men
Booth is classless, simply off the scale!
Kentucky Fried Chicken have a new dish… no breast, huge thighs and two left wings… its called a Cherie….