The end of a period

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.