THIS week everyone in the audience of Oprah Winfrey’s chat show got a free car. Richard and Judy took up the challenge yesterday and gave their viewers a chance to listen to Cherie Blair for free, saving them £30,000 on Cherie’s rumoured new public speaking fee.
Trailers for the show hailed her as Britain’s First Lady, as if she were a British, two-for-the-price-of-one version of Hillary Clinton (only, obviously, without a husband whose personal retinue ranges from inner-office staff, outer-office staff, and below-desk staff). But if this was Cherie’s idea of a “try before you buy” promotion, then you might now be thinking twice before dialling her agent to book her for the after-dinner speech at your annual company dinner, hoping that she might agree to slip in knowing references to waggish industry figures.
Mrs Blair was clearly determined to talk only about what she wanted to talk about.
She was pleasant, polite, and friendly, but stuck firmly to her brief: plugging her new book, The Goldfish Bowl, about what it’s like being a spouse living in No 10, and primly deflecting any probing into what prompted Lord Bragg — the Blairs’ close family friend — to blurt out on television this week that Tony Blair had very nearly chucked it all in over the summer because of “colossal strain” provoked by “personal and family” reasons rather than political concerns.
“I don’t know where Melvyn got it from,” she deftly parried when Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan thrust the controversy at her. “I think he’s mortified that he said it.”
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Her reluctance to speak in public about politics, or the recent family-related stress that allegedly pushed her husband to the brink of quitting politics, meant that the meeting between Mrs Blair and the two veteran chat-show hosts took on the air of a lothario trying to woo a lesbian: trying all the old charming tricks, but failing to rattle the defences.
Instead it was all, “as I mention in my book...”, “what I said in the book was...”, and “the interesting thing about the book is...”. Mrs Blair follows Hillary Clinton and, later, President Bill, on the hard-nosed publishing publicity circuit. We are all book-pluggers now.
It was Norma Major this, Denis Thatcher that, yeah very interesting, no really.
But the reason people tuned in to watch yesterday evening was not so much because they were aching to hear what she had to say about Downing Street spouses; it was more because they were hoping that her appearance might shed some light on Melvyn Bragg’s Westminster fireworks.
The Blairs, understandably, have made big efforts to keep the family’s alleged private turmoil private, so it seems unlikely that they would have given Lord Bragg their blessing now to air it so publicly. So then how does it come about that such a close friend lets something like this slip accidentally, especially when Lord Bragg’s wife, Cate Haste, was co-author of Cherie Blair’s book? A mystery. But not one that she was planning to shed any light on.
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So tell us, why would Bragg say such a thing, Madeley and Finnegan asked Cherie. “I don’t know,” she replied, steering the conversation back to her book. “You’ll have to ask him.”
“We will,” snapped Madeley. Fat chance.