The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Soon afterwards, the right-wing press scored another hit on the Government. Campbell was driven to fury by articles in the Spectator and the Mail on Sunday accusing Number 10 of trying to enhance the Prime Minister’s role at the official mourning for the Queen Mother.51 He lodged a protest with the Press Complaints Commission and became utterly obsessive about trying to extract an apology. The Cabinet Secretary would hear his ancient fax machine at home churning out ‘endless stuff’ from Campbell about this affair. When it became obvious that this was a battle Number 10 could not win, Sir Richard finally told Campbell: ‘You’ve got to know when to stop.’52 In June, Campbell withdrew the complaint, a hateful capitulation to the right-wing press which drove his pathological feelings towards the media to a new and dangerous intensity.

  A series of sleaze stories; a press with a taste for scalps and a nose for New Labour mendacity; the paranoia about the media and a particular hatred for the Mail newspapers; and the Blairs’ appetite for money: this was the combustible cocktail that set the scene for Cheriegate.

  The final ingredient was their attitude towards property, a subject on which Cherie was especially insecure. They enjoyed the use of Number 10, a rather splendid town house in the centre of London. They also had Chequers, the lovely prime ministerial retreat in the Chilterns. Yet this did not satisfy them. ‘It’s living over the office,’ Blair would say of Number 10. He preferred Chequers, to which he escaped most weekends. ‘There are plenty of phones here, but they just don’t seem to ring so much,’ he once told me. But he never forgot, he said, that he was ‘only the tenant’.53

  Cherie was always unhappy that they had no house to call their own apart from the three-bedroom Victorian villa in Sedgefield. Shortly before the 2001 election, when all the polls were correctly forecasting Labour would win by a landslide, Cherie fretted to friends about where she and Tony would live if the voters turfed them out of Number 10.

  She was angry that they were missing out on the long boom in house prices during her husband’s time in office. They sold their home in Richmond Crescent in Islington when they moved into Downing Street. They could have kept their stake in the London property market by renting it out, but that was kiboshed by Alastair Campbell. He remembered how the Tory Chancellor, Norman Lamont, was embarrassed when a ‘Miss Whiplash’ was found to be renting the basement of his home.54

  Campbell’s thinking was rational, but Cherie was cross. The Blairs sold the house for £650,000 in July 1997. Five years later, it was worth over £1 million, a source of constant irritation to Cherie. She saw her chance to get a piece of the property action when their eldest son, Euan, went to university at Bristol in the autumn of 2002. Cherie set her sights on buying two flats in the city. Her husband was never keen on the idea of buying one flat, never mind two, for fear of how it might be used against them by the press. Cherie went ahead regardless.

  To help with the purchase, she turned to a friend. This was Carole Caplin, a former topless model who had reinvented herself as a styling guru. The unlikely relationship between the highly intelligent barrister and the former model went back as far as 1990, when the two met at a gym. When her husband became leader, the ferocity of the scrutiny ‘was a big shock for Cherie’. She’d not previously ‘cared about make-up and hair and now suddenly she was being judged on these things’.55 Margaret Jay thought Cherie was ‘quite scared’ when they first moved into Number 10.56 Charlie Falconer, a friend of Tony for decades, saw that ‘Cherie found it difficult to start with. She was having to make her way in a world in which she’d got no experience.’57 In her early period in the public spotlight, Cherie was desperately unconfident, a vulnerability which the merciless harridans of the British press were quick to identify, exploit and intensify by mocking her hairstyles and dress sense. At joint appearances with the Prescotts, she would exhibit her nerves by grabbing Pauline Prescott’s hand for moral support.

  Caplin became an ever more influential prop for Cherie. She helped her to dress more stylishly and develop a more confident public persona. The advice extended to diet and exercise. The two became extremely close, though it was not a straightforward friendship given that it involved Carole taking a fee from Cherie.

  Tony didn’t mind having Carole around since she seemed to have a calming influence on his wife and boosted her confidence in a way he couldn’t.58 Others were taken aback by the ubiquity of Caplin’s presence in Downing Street. ‘She started fluttering around Number 10 as if she owned the place,’ complained John Prescott.59

  Alastair Campbell thought Caplin would land them in trouble almost from the day she appeared on the scene. He reacted to her visits by exploding: ‘What’s that bloody woman doing here?’60 He claimed to fear that she would kiss-and-tell about the home life of Number 10. As it turned out, it was not Caplin but Campbell who rushed a diary into print the moment that the Blairs left Downing Street. Cherie responded to Campbell’s complaints by retorting that she wasn’t going to have him or anyone else choose her friends for her. The frustration that Blair would never grasp this nettle extended to all his aides. ‘Tony was always at his most irrational whenever it was anything to do with the family,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He had this guilt thing about Cherie. He felt guilty that he had stopped her career even though she obviously loved being the Prime Minister’s wife.’61

  For the flat purchases, Caplin involved her Australian lover, Peter Foster, a convicted con man by whom she was pregnant. Foster was already publicly notorious in Britain yet this seems to have escaped Cherie. ‘There seemed little harm in it,’ she thought, the first of a series of terrible misjudgements.62 By the last weekend of November, some journalists were starting to join the dots from Foster to Caplin to the Blairs.

  ‘Cherie’s style guru has fallen for a fraudster,’ cackled the front page of the Daily Mail on Saturday, 28 November.63 That afternoon, its Sunday sister paper sent a list of twenty-two questions about Foster’s involvement with Cherie and the flats to the Downing Street press office. The Blairs were at Chequers when the questions were faxed on to them.

  ‘I told you not to buy any bloody flats,’ the Prime Minister swore at his wife. She protested that she had never met Foster, though she did confess to having exchanged e-mails with him. Without bothering to look at those e-mails – technology and details were ever his weak spots – Blair answered the Mail on Sunday’s questions, mainly with negatives. On Cherie’s account, it was her husband who then told Campbell ‘in very firm terms’ that there had been no contact with Foster whatsoever.64 On Campbell’s account: ‘Tony is usually very good at saying: “facts, facts, facts”, but we did not get to the facts on this quickly enough, and that led the press office inadvertently to mislead the press.’65

  They were racing towards one of the most searing episodes in the life of the inner Blair court.

  Alastair Campbell had stepped back from giving daily briefings to lobby correspondents, delegating the task to two civil servants, Tom Kelly and Godric Smith. They faithfully repeated the Blairs’ line about the flats and gave emphatic, on-the-record statements denying any involvement with Foster. That line collapsed within three days when the Daily Mail came into possession of the e-mails between Foster and Cherie, which included one message in which Cherie gushed her thanks to the fraudster for helping to negotiate the flat purchases: ‘You are a star.’66

  Relations within the inner court went ‘into meltdown’ on the Wednesday evening when they learnt that the Daily Mail would be splashing the e-mails the next morning. ‘What you got was a coming together of a lot of the underlying problems between Tony, Cherie, Alastair and Fiona, amplified by the whole Carole Caplin thing and a press frenzy,’ says a member of the senior staff. ‘It is what happens when people are around each other for too long. It was a torrid time, a horrid time.’67

  By now, says Jonathan Powell, the relationship between the Blairs and the Campbells had ‘gone septic’.68 Campbell and his partner were ‘in a state of nuclear outrage’, according to a fr
iend and minister with a ringside seat for this affair. ‘Fiona loathes Alastair working at Number 10. The Foster stuff gives Fiona a way of saying “these [the Blairs] are the ghastly people we’re working for, you’ve got to get out.” Alastair hates Cherie because she’s given Fiona that ammunition.’69

  When he learnt about the Mail’s next splash about Cherie, Campbell was incandescently angry, righteously vindicated in his previous warnings and ‘determined that if anyone went down for this, it wasn’t going to be Alastair Campbell’.70

  When the Blairs got back from the theatre, Campbell demanded that Cherie show him and his staff all her e-mail contacts with Foster. Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Tom Kelly and Godric Smith stood around a cringing Cherie’s computer while her husband paced in the background. ‘It was awful,’ says one present at the scene. ‘It did look like a Gestapo interrogation.’71

  The next day, Fiona Millar turned on the Prime Minister’s wife: ‘Everyone in the press office hates you. They’ve told lies on your behalf and none of them ever wants to work for you again.’72 Tom Kelly, for one, was actually feeling sorry for Cherie. ‘She was embarrassed and chastened.’73

  The media and the public had been misled and Downing Street would have to admit so, a reverse the more humiliating for them because the defeat was at the hands of the Mail papers that the Blairs loathed so much. Cherie was forced to issue a statement admitting that Foster was involved in the purchase of the flats and taking the blame on herself for the misleading statements put out by Number 10.

  A second weekend in a row was consumed by Cheriegate. Blair shut himself in his study at Chequers on Saturday dealing with Iraq. He and his wife barely spoke. The News of the World came in with a series of questions for Number 10 about claims that Cherie had known about Foster’s past, that Carole had tried to do deals on clothes, and ‘wacky stuff about them having mudbaths and showers together’.74

  Newspapers that Sunday were packed with stories and commentaries pouring opprobrium on Cherie. Campbell had given detailed briefings to selected Sunday journalists heaping all the blame on Cherie, an exercise designed to exculpate himself, Millar and the Number 10 press operation. Never before had the inner court turned so viciously on itself. The Prime Minister’s most intimate aide was now spinning against the Prime Minister’s wife.

  ‘Cherie is now outraged that Alastair and Fiona won’t protect her,’ observed one of the Blairs’ oldest friends. ‘Tony is caught in the middle.’75

  One person’s crisis can turn into another man’s opportunity. With Blair and his wife estranged from Campbell and Millar, here was a chance for Peter Mandelson to remind the Blairs that they still had a friend in need. He landed at Heathrow from New York on Sunday morning. As he waited by the baggage carousel, he picked up on his mobile a desperate message from Blair. Mandelson went straight to Number 10, where he spent most of that day and the next up in the flat trying to calm them down and grip the crisis.

  ‘The Prime Minister felt that something very serious was engulfing him,’ says Mandelson. ‘Cherie was being demonised. She was being pursued, persecuted as if she were a Minister or elected official in her own right.’ The story had now made ‘the fateful jump’ from ‘hostile newspapers on to television and radio’.76

  Blair watched with horror as this media feeding frenzy devoured his wife. ‘Tony was beside himself,’ says Sally Morgan.77 Angry as he was with his wife, he also felt spasms of guilt. ‘He knew she was trying to make money to make sure they were all right.’78 He railed to his aides about ‘the media scum’. He did not often lose it. Over this, he did. He had one of his ‘meltdown moments’, raging: ‘What do they want me to do? Sack my wife?’79

  Things turned even blacker on Monday, when Foster’s solicitors issued a statement saying that Cherie had contacted them about his appeal against deportation. Campbell confronted the Prime Minister’s wife while she was having her hair done. ‘That’s it,’ he snarled, arms folded, glowering at her via the mirror. ‘One more time, Cherie, did you at any point have anything to do with the immigration case?’

  ‘I’ve told you, no,’ she said. ‘You’re determined to humiliate me, aren’t you? I know you’ve been briefing against me.’

  ‘I don’t need to. You do it all on your own.’

  The hairdresser, André, intervened. ‘Don’t you talk to Cherie like that!’

  ‘You mind your own business,’ said Campbell. ‘Remember you’re just a fucking hairdresser.’

  ‘Apologise,’ demanded Cherie.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he snorted. ‘Don’t forget you brought all of this on yourself.’80

  Campbell disputes her claim that he swore at the hairdresser.81 He would have been angrier still had he known what Cherie planned to do next. After hosting a Christmas party for Barnardo’s and presiding over the switching on of the tree on Downing Street, she slipped out of the building via the rear car park for a clandestine rendezvous with Carole Caplin at the hairdresser’s flat.82

  By Tuesday, the Conservatives were calling for an inquiry and the Daily Mail was sending questions to Number 10 saying that Cherie had been trying to nobble a judge.83

  Blair was yet angrier and all for going on the attack against the media himself. Mandelson persuaded him that the only realistic hope of finding closure was for his wife to speak. Cherie was scheduled to present the Partners in Excellence awards at the Atrium in Millbank. She could be sure of a friendly audience from the organisation of which she was a patron. The location was conveniently in the same building as much of the Westminster media. This was an opportunity they could use to try to win some sympathy for Cherie. Charlie Falconer – ‘a calming influence’84 – came in to Number 10 to help write the speech for her and because she wanted someone she trusted to protect her interests from Campbell. Mandelson was still on hand, though he couldn’t help reminding them of his summary ejection from the Cabinet two years earlier, remarking that none of them had been there for him, ‘when I was thrown out of the top floor window’.85 After Cherie read through the script written for her, she worried that she might crack up in front of the cameras. Mandelson advised that she would keep her composure by picking out friendly people in the audience and looking in their eyes. She glanced at Campbell and said: ‘I certainly don’t want to look at him.’86 Most of her words were written by other hands, but Cherie proved to be effective at conveying the impression that the emotions in it were authentically her own. Some of her husband’s and father’s thespian talent was on display when she performed at Millbank. ‘I am not Superwoman,’ she declared in a tearful mea culpa live to the television cameras. She sought public empathy, especially from other women. ‘The reality of my daily life is that I’m juggling a lot of balls in the air. And some of them get dropped.’87 The line about ‘juggling balls’ was, ironically, scripted by Fiona Millar.88

  Most of the rest of this feminine appeal was concocted by men: Campbell, Mandelson and Falconer. She defiantly defended her friendship with Caplin, whom she was still seeing and would continue to see, but she admitted that it was an error to allow Foster, ‘someone I barely knew, to get involved with my personal affairs’.89

  Her husband, who was at his weekly audience with the Queen, missed the performance. ‘How did it go?’ he asked when he got back from the Palace. ‘Turn on the television,’ said Campbell. ‘They are running it over and over again.’90 The heat began to fade, though the story would continue to flare up in the headlines for a while, not least because of Foster, who made a series of spectacular claims, the most audacious of which was that Tony was the father of Carole’s baby.91 When Cheriegate was still generating headlines for a third weekend, it ignited another ferocious row within the inner court, this one between Blair and Campbell. The propagandist raged at the Prime Minister: ‘You’re married to a woman who is determined to protect and help a woman who is in love with a con man, so you are linked to a con man.’

  Blair shouted back: ‘I am not linked to a con man! You think Cherie ha
s done something monstrous and I don’t!’92

  Her husband was right. Cherie was not monstrous. She had not committed a crime, but an idiotic mistake. It was an amazing lapse to permit a known con man to insinuate himself into the lives of the Blairs. When they were then caught out by the press, they committed the habitual offence of trying to cover up rather than coming clean. That made things ten times worse.

  Both the Blairs felt guilty about it afterwards. She because she had badly let down her husband at a time of intense pressure over Iraq. He because he felt he had been so consumed by Iraq that he had neglected her.93

  Their relationship was healed amidst mutual expressions of remorse. Caplin remained a presence in Number 10 despite it all. Cherie even let Marie Claire magazine photograph Caplin doing her make-up on the marital bed.

  Other relationships were never the same after this psychodrama which tore apart the heart of Number 10. Fiona Millar left a few months later and repeatedly and ferociously rowed with her partner when he would not quit too. Cherie never trusted Campbell again. He and Blair started to drift apart to the point where the Prime Minister dangerously lost control of Campbell during the Kelly Affair six months later.

  The inner court was now fractured and just at the moment when Tony Blair was facing the most pivotal decision of his premiership.

  8. Naked in the Middle of the Room

  The pleasant, upmarket seaside resort of Le Touquet was the venue for an Anglo-French summit in the first week of February 2003. Tony Blair, America’s greatest ally in Europe, was head to head with Jacques Chirac, the most vigorous critic of Washington’s drive to war. Among officials on both sides, there was high anxiety that their differences would erupt into a public slanging match.