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Saturday 22 November 2008

The end of a period

Vicki Woods on Cherie Blair's memoirs

This is a meretricious, puzzling and deeply unsatisfactory book and I resent every one of the 12 hours I spent plodding through it on a Sunday. Cherie’s publishers call her ‘insightful’ and ‘funny’, which she ain’t, and they bill the book as the inspiring tale of a clever, indomitable, feminist woman with a fierce sense of justice, a ‘working-class Liverpool girl’, the first in her family to go university, who pulled herself up by her own bootstraps from a hardscrabble Scouse background to the highest in the land.

Fair enough, she did, alongside untold numbers of her lucky postwar generation. She told a poky interviewer (in one of her endless interviews) that ‘my husband was the nice, middle-class public schoolboy; I was the working-class girl from Liverpool’, as though the gap between them was the same as the present-day gap between rich and poor, which it wasn’t. And while she clearly wasn’t born sucking a silver spoon, there were some remarkably toff-y aspects to her life. Yes, her mother ‘worked in a chip-shop’, briefly (so did the millionaire model Agyness Deyn and so — for a week or two — did I), but later she worked as a travel agent and the sisters holidayed swankily in France, Liguria, Ibiza and Romania. Cynics might point out that the second in her family to go to university was her younger sister Lindsey; that her mother went to RADA and her father, Tony Booth, to the Central School. Actors aren’t ‘working-class’, they’re off-piste entirely, classwise. Mrs Blair is 54; she’s been middle-class since her early twenties. One grows tired of retro-Monty Pythonism about other folks’ shoebox roots.

Having read the thing from start to index, I cannot for the life of me see why it was printed or what she is trying to write. Political gossip about who was stabbing whose back in Downing Street is spread pretty thin. My Rise to High Office is a non-story for the wife who rises on her husband’s arm; there is no office (thank heaven) and many officials to militate against such. The tale of ‘an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances’ is one she can’t tell: she worked furiously to prevent the press ‘invading her children’s privacy’ in Downing Street. Now she’s made the decision partially to invade it herself, she only speaks of two at any length: her oldest and youngest sons. She rolls out Euan’s arrest for binge-drinking yet again and notes his quizzing of the Spanish prime minister Aznar on the unraisable subject of Gibraltar. Leo toddles across the pages, charming Clinton and Chirac, and being coached by his nanny to sing the National Anthem to the Queen. Nicky is mentioned occasionally; Kathryn barely at all.

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