THERE was a time when I was a Cherie Blair fan. I didn't have photographs of her up in my room, you understand, or quote her verbatim at dinner parties. But there were things about her I admired: her intellect, of course; her ability to combine a job as a barrister with bringing up a family; and her habit of saying exactly what she thought, when everyone else was trying to stay "on-message".
Here was a woman with a razor-sharp brain who was not prepared to dangle on her husband's arm. With a first in law, she had opinions on domestic and foreign policy, and she wasn't about to be silenced by the party machine. I liked the fact that she w
as snapped dishevelled in her nightie the morning after the 1997 election, and I liked her stand on penal reform. But most of all I liked her because so many of those whose opinions I detest were out to get her: there is, after all, no greater endorsement of your feminist credentials than to become the subject of a hate campaign in the Daily Mail.
Later, when events threw doubt on this interpretation, I made allowances. Cherie's obsession with making money was, I saw, the legacy of a childhood spent in poverty; her whingeing over life in Downing Street understandable given she was holding down a job and bringing up four children.
By the time she 'misled' everyone about Peter Foster's involvement in the couple's purchase of flats, however, I knew the game was up. Cherie was not a feminist icon, but a cynical materialist, prepared to shelve her principles to get herself out of a sticky situation, and to upstage her husband for a few seconds in the limelight.
What I didn't get, though, was the scale of her self-absorption. It took the publication of her memoirs Speaking For Myself for me to understand the extent to which Cherie's universe revolves around herself; the way in which major events are significant only in as far as they impact on her. So a section about David Kelly is not an insider's analysis of how his outing as the source of the story about the 'sexed-up' weapons of mass destruction dossier drove him to his death, but a bleating about how her husband aged 10 years in six days after the civil servant's suicide.
Even her description of the couple's last day in Downing Street – when she hijacked her husband's big moment by shouting "we won't miss you" to the assembled photographers – becomes not an apology for her flaws, but a paean to them. "In the end, part of the reason (Tony] loves me is my unpredictable character," she gloats. "I am the abrasiveness against which he can spark." Yes, of course, dear, it's all about you.
Once, political memoirs, written with a bit of distance, provided insight into major political moments, such as the Suez Crisis or the compilation of the 'Lavender list'. But Speaking For Myself is illuminating only in as much as it reveals the personality of the author herself and the dumbed down atmosphere in which contemporary politics is played out.
If journalists are lambasted for focusing on personalities as opposed to policies, what are we to make of a book in which the achievement of a party that took power after 18 years in the wilderness plays second fiddle to petty squabbles and name-dropping?
The book is full of Cherie's opinions on world leaders, but does she have an original thought on any of them? She says her "heart bled" for Hillary Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair; that her reaction to Clinton's dalliance was "Bill, how could you?" Well, most of us had a broadly similar reaction just from watching them on the television.
And her tone is unbelievably shallow. If Private Eye had decided to run a spoof of her memoirs written in the style of Jordan, it couldn't have achieved such a masterpiece of vacuity, pseudo-psychology and stating of the bloody obvious. It veers haphazardly from Mills and Boon ("As for his eyes, which I'd barely registered, before, they were a deep penetrating blue, penetrating because 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") to Jerry Springer.
How else can you describe her apparent compulsion to tell all about Leo's conception at Balmoral? It was, she said, the result of her being too embarrassed to pack her contraceptive "equipment" (equipment? What was she using, a chastity belt?) for fear her "unmentionables" would be seen by the servants. Leaving aside the fact that the whole scenario seems highly improbable, what grown woman feels the need to refer to her pills, condoms or whatever as "unmentionables"? Surely not the sophisticated barrister, who – while a pupil at Derry Irvine's chambers – strung along two boyfriends before sealing her relationship with Tony on the top of a double decker bus.
Coming the coy Catholic with her readers is disingenuous, but harmless. Less so, her sudden willingness to offer up her children's private lives after years of insisting they were sacrosanct. At the height of the MMR controversy, Cherie refused to confirm Leo had been given the injection, although doing so would have helped ease public fears. Now, with a whopping advance on the table, she is happy to reveal not only that Leo had the jag, but that Euan was so precocious he once baited the Spanish prime minister over the issue of Gibraltar.
As a work of literature or an analysis of the Blair years, Speaking For Myself is risible. But it would be wrong to dismiss it as worthless. By reducing a decade in Number 10 to the status of an Australian soap opera, it reminds us why so many people today have disengaged from politics.
The full article contains 992 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
