Cherie, contempt for shopgirls and the hypocrisy of her ‘ deprived’ childhood
THE truth is,’ Cherie Blair explained in an interview this month in a legal magazine, ‘ if I hadn’t had the funding from the state to go to university, I would have worked in a shop.’ It’s a pretty breathtaking statement, when you think about it.
First, this avowed socialist insultingly dismisses working in a shop as if it were a fate worse than death.
Second, she expects us to believe that in 1972, with four grade As at A-level, she would have had no career choices whatever. Third, she further implies that success is dependent on having a university education.
And fourth, she praises the system of free university education that her husband has abolished. Oh no, bleats a Downing Street spokesman, no doubt cursing under his breath as once again he has to insist the Prime Minister’s wife has been misinterpreted. What she really meant to say was that ‘ poorer students need support from the state, which is what they will get from the new, fairer system’.
What hypocrisy!
Mrs Blair is, as we know, prone to gaffes. Some occur because of her hunger for money and status, some because she has in abundance that New Labour sense of moral superiority, and some because she believes she can switch from being Mrs Tony Blair to Ms Cherie Booth QC whenever she chooses.
As Sir Christopher Meyer revealed in the Mail this week, Mrs Blair enjoys the excitement and glamour of moving in rich and powerful circles, yet she also feels entitled, when on duty as prime ministerial escort, to speak as Ms Booth.
George W. Bush told Sir Christopher that Cherie had attacked him for refusing to let his country sign up to the International Criminal Court.
Can you imagine how would have reacted if Laura Bush had followed her beliefs and laid into the Prime Minister for permitting late abortions?
Furthermore, Ms Booth’s views on the law frequently run counter to her husband’s interests and therefore should not be aired in public.
Mr Blair has already learned, painfully, that his headlong rush to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights — an issue extremely close to Cherie’s heart and those of her highly-paid colleagues in Matrix Chambers — into the law of the United Kingdom is hampering the fight against terrorism at every turn.
And in the middle of the night he must worry that zealous human rights lawyers may yet land him in the dock of that very International Criminal Court on which his wife is so keen, over Britain’s involvement in Iraq.
No one expects Ms Booth to give up her job or to keep her opinions to herself in private, but is it too much to expect that after eight years in No. 10 Mrs Blair might have learned when to keep her mouth shut?
The latest embarrassment is certainly driven by Cherie’s apparent belief that she had a very tough childhood from which she was lucky to escape.
Yet, while it is certainly true that money was relatively tight and that her father, the actor Tony Booth, abandoned his young family and was inadequate, in many respects Cherie had a privileged upbringing.
She had brains, her mother and grandmother were loving and supportive, her Liverpool community was stable and — because Labour had not yet wrecked the grammar schools — she had a first- class education.
The Catholic single- sex grammar school, Seafield Convent, to which Cherie went in 1965 expected their best girls to become teachers or doctors or lawyers.
Cherie’s teachers would have laughed at fashionable nonsense about child- centred education. Seafield girls were expected to be industrious, reliable and wellbehaved and to take their religion seriously.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that 30 years later this wife of a Labour Prime Minister would ensure that their children were sent not to a local comprehensive but to an exclusive, traditional, selective Catholic voluntary-aided school. Again she indignantly denies that she has been hypocritical.
So much for the deprived childhood. Now for the restricted opportunities she hints at.
In 1972, Cherie went to the London School of Economics on a full local authority grant, where she duly earned her firstclass honours and a place in former Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine’s chambers. She was a pupil barrister there along with Tony Blair: the rest is history.
Would the young Cherie, with her four excellent A-levels, have gone to university under the funding arrangement introduced years later by her husband? Who knows? With her concerns about money, she might well have refused to take on the burden of a student loan.
But would not going to university really have been so terrible? Most people didn’t back then — about ninety-five per cent of the population — yet many of them still rose to the top in politics, business and public service.
When Cherie left school. there would have been innumerable openings for such a bright, industrious young woman. A shop would have been fine. There was nothing stopping such a talented person from becoming a management trainee and ending up running the company.
Still, partly influenced by her grandmother, Vera, who would visit the law courts just to hear a famous Liverpool barrister called Rose Heilbron speak, Cherie had set her heart on the law.
Had she not been awarded a grant, she could have done what David Trimble did. His father had insisted he get a job rather than continue his studies and so he found another route.
He joined the Civil Service and took advantage of a scheme that sent bright, ambitious would-be lawyers to university. He ended up as an academic lawyer and a politician and today has a Nobel Prize for Peace.
Sometimes, it seems that Cherie feels the Prime Minister had it easy compared with her, with his public school education helping him to Oxford and his charisma winning him prizes — such as a safe Parliamentary seat — that she was denied.
Yet, in truth, Cherie Booth has led a charmed existence. The deprivations of her youth were minor and the opportunities immense.
She has a devoted husband, four well- educated children and a successful career and — as Mrs Blair — she meets the kind of people she has always longed to rub shoulders with.
She resents public criticism, but she brings it on herself. All she has to do to avoid it is to remember how lucky she is — and to cultivate discretion.