Cherie Blair like Hillary
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from May 1997.
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Cherie Blair, 42, an image-maker's dream for a top politician's wife, also has another trait: keeping quiet about politics.
Through the six-week election campaign, she sat alongside Labour Party leader Tony Blair at meetings, laughed at the jokes, applauded the big speech once more, made small talk with voters, and uttered not one public word.
The strategy of adoring looks and anodyne chat irritated feminists.
But it worked for a woman who risks being called the power-behind-the-throne of the man who trounced the Conservatives in national elections on Thursday by pushing Labour toward the centre.
"It seemed perfectly natural for her not to say anything ... Whatever she said would be misconstrued," Blair said.
Mrs. Blair was a Labour activist at 16. And if fate - Cont'd on facing page from facing page or a parliamentary nomination - had gone the other way, the Blairs could have been celebrating her victory early Friday.
She ran for Parliament and lost in 1983, the year Blair won in Sedgefield, a solidly Labour district in north England.
The Blairs, or so the legend goes, made a pact soon after marrying in 1980: whoever got into Parliament first would be the politician with big ambitions, the other one the lawyer with big earnings. Pact or not, that is how it's worked out.
As Cherie Booth, she has a highly successful career at the Bar, specialising in employment cases and plans to return to work soon after the campaign break. In 1995, she became a Queen's Counsel. That status is reserved for the most successful lawyers and boosted her earnings to a reported £250,000 pounds ($408,000) a year - comfortably more than treble his as opposition leader.
As one of Britain's youngest women QCs, she has a good chance of becoming a judge.
"I don't think I would give it up if he gets in, and he would not expect me to," she said in an interview with The Observer, a pro-Labour weekly, in 1995. "I welcome the prospect of being the first premier's wife with her own career." Mrs. Blair was reared with a sister in the northwest England port of Liverpool - the eldest child of an actor, Tony Booth, who fathered seven daughters through a string of broken marriages and love affairs. Her mother, smalltime actress Gale Smith, was Booth's first wife. By the time Cherie was 7, Booth had left for the mistress by whom he had the next two daughters.
Cherie Booth took a first-class degree at the London School of Economics and met Blair when they were both trainee lawyers. They have three children - Euan, 13; Nicholas, 11, and Kathyrn, 9. Unlike her husband, who has the easy manner of the well-polished politician, Mrs. Blair can appear tense and on edge with a wide-eyed look caricatured by cartoonists. Her clothes and hair are a favourite tabloid topic.
"The trouble is she can never win - either she's trying too hard with her clothes or she's not trying hard enough," Blair told a woman's weekly magazine, Woman's Own. "... I have, on occasions, hidden newspapers from her."
