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Sunday 7 September 2008

The end of a period

Vicki Woods on Cherie Blair's memoirs

Tony has Alastair, Hilary, Anji, Kate, Liz, Jonathan, Sally — all kinds of dedicated bondservants to help him do his thing. And Gordon’s thing, of course, though Gordon’s thing seems to be countering Tony’s thing. Poor Cherie has nobody to help her do her thing, apart from Fiona (Alastair’s partner), who becomes very naggy about Iraq throughout late 2002 and early 2003. ‘Why don’t you just tell Tony to stop it?’

My response to her was always the same. ‘Listen, Fiona, I don’t see the papers, I don’t see what he and Alastair see, and if Tony tells me, as he does, that if we don’t stop Saddam Hussein the world will be a more dangerous place, then I believe him. And in my view you and I should be supporting our men in these difficult decisions, not making it worse by nagging them.’

I don’t know. When feminists fall out . . .

Why this book was written was to get Cherie’s slaps in first, I suppose. At naggy Fiona, at ‘the press and its relentless campaign to paint me as a grasping, scheming embarrassment’. To give us the ‘truth’ about the real Cherie, who braced and bolstered the man she loved when all around him were scheming and betraying and being found unhelpfully dead while Tony was on his world round-trip to Tokyo, Korea and China. She says she wrapped her arms around Tony when he crouched down among Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles’ installation in Beijing.

He was desperate . . . ‘You are a good man’, I told him. ‘And God knows your motives are pure, even if the consequences are not as you had hoped.’

Really? She said that? Unfortunately I don’t trust her recall. Anyone who attempts to read this lumpen tome should note the disclaimer at the front. (She’s a lawyer, remember):

My memory is not infallible, and this is not a history book. It is simply one woman’s attempt to recollect her life — a memoir of someone who, for a time, had a walk-on part in history.