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Saturday 22 November 2008

The end of a period

Vicki Woods on Cherie Blair's memoirs

The author was interviewed at length on Woman’s Hour (her memoirs are Book of the Week as well, annoyingly). She kept saying that ‘people I meet tell me they don’t know me, not the real Cherie, so Speaking for Myself is my chance to tell the truth about myself.’ It’s a rare celeb-biog that tells the truths you really want to hear, and I’ve read brighter ones than this: Victoria Beckham’s anonymous ghost writes with breathless brio and style and Katie Price’s (‘Page 3 Jordan’, if you need reminding) makes a much better fist of juggling three lovers at a time. Cherie’s discussions of Blair-on-Blair action are arm-pricklingly coy. ‘A really strong body . . . His eyes were a clear, penetrating blue . . . They seemed to see right through me, to the extent that I could feel a blush rise up from some uncharted part of me and flood my face.’ (Uncharted part? He was her fifth boyfriend.)

There are plenty of rude bits, but a bit too much OBGYN for the general reader. When she was at her direct-grant grammar school, ‘Auntie Audrey and I became very close. I even started my periods at her house.’ (They missed that sentence out on Book of the Week). On the birth of her first-born: ‘After an epidural and a high-forceps delivery . . . utterly ghastly, including a third-degree tear . . . there was blood all over the place.’ On her second-born: ‘The moment we got there, I had to dash to the loo and they had to pull me off . . . I was 10 cm dilated.’ Her third was a breech, delivered by Caesarian. I’ll spare you. But she really goes to town on the fourth, historic pregnancy: at her 45th birthday dinner in September 1999, she’d just been appointed to the bench part-time as a recorder; they’d enjoyed a ‘good break at the Strozzis’ in Italy’; Tony was feeling ‘relaxed’ and all the energy he had ‘expended over Kosovo had been worth it’. There was only ‘one little shadow on my immediate horizon: my period. Where was it?’ She had not, as the wide world now knows, ‘packed my contraceptive equipment’ for the weekend at Balmoral. So when Tony got back from Chequers, she ‘showed him the little dipper and explained the significance of the blue line’. Blue lines, red lines, front lines — what a guy! Once he’d grasped the significance, ‘he said we’d have to tell Alastair’.

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