A stash of private letters and the blonde who drove Cherie mad with jealousy
... that’s her on the right and with Tony in this picture
friend when he was a teenager, and had worked for him as an intimate assistant since 1994.
Unfortunately, Cherie discovered an old collection of affectionate notes between Blair and Anji in a cardboard box, and this sparked raw jealousy.
In a succession of rows, she demanded that Hunter be fired. Her husband pleaded that a prime minister was surely entitled to employ people he trusted. But this cut no ice with Cherie.
After a succession of exhausting arguments, Blair finally managed to persuade Cherie that Hunter should be allowed to stay. Michael Levy, the Labour Party’s fundraiser, was then asked to broker a suitable job description for the assistant with the Civil Service.
Thus Anji Hunter became the ‘special assistant for presentation and planning’. To assuage her humiliation, Cherie sent Hunter a note that outlined the restrictive terms of her employment: ‘In so far as your job brings you into contact with me, that will be kept to a minimum . . . I trust this is clear.’
Gregarious and warm towards those she trusted, Cherie — as Anji Hunter discovered — could also deploy bitchiness that crushed like a Centurion tank.
Her jealousy continued to rage unabated. More than a year later, around Christmas 1998, Cherie burst into Blair’s office while he was talking with his assistant.
In a ferocious outburst, she rounded on Hunter. ‘When are you leaving?’ she demanded to know. Hunter said nothing. Cherie then demanded that she should be fired, before storming out of the office.
Later, she attacked her husband for ignoring her feelings. Blair retorted that she was being ridiculous and could damage the government; she would simply have to accept that Hunter was staying.
In 2001, just before the General Election, the atmosphere in the flat was poisoned by a 90-minute row between Blair, Cherie, Alastair Campbell and his combative partner Fiona Millar who acted as Cherie’s aide. Again, Anji Hunter was the point of contention, with Cherie and Millar demanding that she be sacked.
Fiona Millar also upped the ante by telling the Prime Minister that
his government was too Right-wing, and that he should also fire his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Blair held firm: he was the Prime Minister and he would be the one to decide on his staff.
As for Hunter, she’d had enough. She told Blair that she would definitely be leaving No 10 after the election. But he pleaded with her to stay. The election came and went, but the war of Blair’s women went on with Cherie and Millar again insisting that Hunter be dismissed.
As long as her husband’s assistant remained in place, said Cherie, she herself would continue to feel sidelined. Her jealousy may have been irrational but it was ineradicable.
Cherie was ‘ being ridiculous’, declared Blair, startled by the vehemence of the ultimatum.
The issue was still not resolved when the Blairs left for a holiday in Mexico, where they underwent a ‘ rebirthing experience’, which involved covering themselves with watermelon, papaya and mud and screaming loudly to signal the pain of birth. When they got back, Blair had changed his mind: Hunter should leave. Her continued presence was aggravating his relationship with Cherie — and, in any case, his assistant had been offered a senior post at oil giant BP. Relations between the two old friends appeared to have deteriorated to such an extent that Blair didn’t show up at Hunter’s farewell party.
But even once her jealousy had abated, his wife was still proving troublesome. At the beginning of December 2002, the Mail published a story revealing that Cherie had bought two flats in Bristol, worth £270,000, with the help of convicted fraudster Peter Foster, the boyfriend of Carole Caplin.
He had negotiated a £40,000 discount on the flats by dropping the Blairs’ name to the developer.
When Blair asked his wife whether she’d had any contact with Foster, however, she said no — an answer Campbell duly repeated to the media.
It was untrue. The Mail had obtained copies of emails between the two, including Cherie’s thanks to Foster for his help. ‘ You are a star,’ she had written.
The resulting storm was exacerbated by Blair’s peculiar relationship with Caplin.
Staff at Chequers reported that she stayed there for extended periods in order to give massages to the Prime Minister. Occasionally, he went to her London home for antitoxin rubbing treatments.
Inevitably, there was gossip about the nature of their relationship.
Ever since 1994, Campbell and Millar had disliked Caplin and warned that her presence in the Blairs’ lives would become a problem.
But, mindful of Cherie’s needs, Blair had rejected their warnings. Campbell, an ex-alcoholic, became venomous after the Mail proved that Cherie had lied. Without any attempt to hide his anger, he briefed journalists against the Prime Minister’s wife and openly scorned Caplin.
In the meltdown that followed, Blair raged at everyone. The crisis finally ended when Cherie made a tearful apology on TV. Fiona Millar stayed in Downing Street and Caplin left.
But it wasn’t long before the Prime Minister’s wife was showing her teeth again.
Ros Mark, the children’s former nanny, had written an anodyne book about her time with the Blairs for a children’s charity — and Cherie launched a lawsuit against her in a case even the lawyers involved in it regarded as vindictive.
Why did Tony Blair put up with all this? To date, no one has really succeeded in unravelling their relationship.
The worst that can be said is that their marriage thrives on mutual irritation.
Some have even praised Cherie for transforming a geeky youth into a calm socialite who is able to pacify her hysteria. Among her many misfortunes during his time in office was the presence of people she actively disliked — not least Alastair Campbell and Gordon Brown, who was forbidden to enter the Blairs’ private flat.
But in many ways, Cherie was her own worst enemy. Without pausing to reflect, she once asked the Queen whether her ancestor Queen Victoria had really had an affair with her servant John Brown.
She also matily told Princess Anne: ‘Call me Cherie.’
‘I’d rather not, Mrs Blair,’ Anne replied.
Similarly inappropriate was Cherie’s boast to a Sun photographer, who was taking pictures in the Downing Street garden, that her husband ‘does it five times a night’. (Blair himself confirmed this to the photographer: ‘At least! I can do it more, depending how I feel’ — and his boast was overheard by the Sun’s political editor.)
Then there was Cherie’s visit to Australia, where she found it impossible to pass up an offer by a Melbourne shop-owner to ‘take something’ as a gift. She grabbed 68 items.
‘I wish she didn’t have this thing about a bargain,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson.
On Cherie’s return, he pleaded with her: ‘ When we leave, we’ll have lots of money. We’ll have enough. You’ve got to stop this.’
They would be seriously wealthy, he promised — with enough to stop her familiar plea of: ‘ Why can’t we go by private plane?’
Today, with the couple’s £25 million property empire and burgeoning wealth from questionable sources, she has finally got her way.
ADAPTED from Broken Vows: Tony Blair — The Tragedy Of Power by Tom Bower, which will be published by Faber & Faber on March 3 at £20. © 2016 Tom Bower. To preorder a copy for £15 visit mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Discount until March 5, p&p free on orders over £12.