Unless Tony Blair backtracks on his promise to quit before the next election, the two prime ministerial candidates at the starting line will be David Cameron and Gordon Brown. In which case it will not be so much a sprint to political victory as an exhausted dribble to the finishing line.
For Brown, 54, and his wife Sarah, 42, have announced that they, like the Camerons, are expecting their third child this year. The timing of the new arrivals — Brown Jr is due in July, Cameron Jr next month — means that both men will be juggling toddlers as well as hectic campaigning schedules when Britain casts its vote in 2009.
Motherhood has come relatively late to the former Sarah Macaulay, who already has a son, John, 2. But age should not present any obstacles to having another straightforward birth. The news is especially uplifting given that the couple’s first child, Jennifer Jane, was born very prematurely in December 2001 and died ten days later. The couple’s public grief and subsequent elation at the arrival of their son helped to humanise the rather dour, intensely private Chancellor and his silent, steely ex-PR executive wife.
Born in Buckinghamshire in 1963, Mrs Brown spent her early childhood in Tanzania. After her parents split up she and her two brothers lived with their teacher mother in North London. On leaving Camden School for Girls she read psychology at Bristol University, then joined the PR world. At the age of 30 she set up a PR firm with a schoolfriend, Julia Hobsbawm, the daughter of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications moved in Labour circles; the ambitious Macaulay is said to have kept newspaper clippings about Brown, though whether because of professional conscientiousness or private attraction is unknown. Romance blossomed in 1994, when she and Brown shared a flight from London to Scotland. The Chancellor’s dislike of media interest in his private life meant that their relationship would stay secret for three more years. The pair finally wed at his Fife home in 2000.
She has coped with her personal heartache by doing what she does best: campaigning. She founded a children’s charity, PiggyBankKids, and is patron of charities dealing with cancer and domestic violence. She has also helped to soften Brown’s public image by, for example, buying him an iPod. She, of all people, knows that economic prudence must be tempered with electoral popularity if her husband is to beat Cameron in 2009.
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