Cherie Blair Memoir ’tells All’

IF CHERIE Blair had any desire to shield herself and her family from the public spotlight during her life at No. 10 Downing Street, she seems to have thrown it to the wind now that Tony Blair is no longer prime minister.

In a no-holds-barred autobiography just released in the UK, the outspoken Queens Counsel has thrown off the shackles of a PMs wife and lifted the lid on her private life as well as the feuds, friendships and Machiavellian machinations that coloured the life of her husband.

Mrs Blair, 53, not only reveals that her last child, Leo, was conceived during a visit to the Queen at Balmoral but tells, too, how a subsequent miscarriage was used by the prime minister and his spin doctors to defuse speculation about an early invasion of Iraq.

Mrs Blairs book, Speaking for Myself, has made headlines in Britain and provides an emotional description of how she lay bleeding as her husband and his press chief, Alastair Campbell, decided to announce the miscarriage to ensure that a delay in the couples holiday in France did not spark false headlines about Iraq.

And she recalls her acute embarrassment over her toiletries bag being unpacked for her during a previous visit to Balmoral as guest of the Queen. It was this that led her to decide to leave her contraceptives at home the following year.

"We had been on the usual prime ministerial weekend to Balmoral. The first year we had actually stayed in 1998 I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables.

"This year I had been a little more circumspect, and had not packed my contraceptive equipment out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another … But then, I thought, I cant be. Im too old. It must be the menopause."

Mrs Blair is reported to have been paid a six-figure sum for her book, which also provides titillating detail about the fractured relationship between her husband and his chancellor, now PM, Gordon Brown.

With echoes of the broken promises and fraught leadership battles between John Howard and Peter Costello, Mrs Blair categorically denies long-held political rumour that a deal over the succession was struck between the two men in an inner-London restaurant in 1994. Brown supporters insist that Mr Blair pledged a hand-over timetable and subsequently reneged.

She also reveals a woman who worried about money in the early days at No. 10, as the big mortgage and bank overdraft were being serviced by her. She writes that she was furious when her meticulous budgeting was upset when Mr Brown froze a long-promised 25% pay rise for ministers, shouting out: "How dare Gordon do that."

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