Broken Vows by Tom Bower Page B

sleep in Ken Clarke’s bed,’ her husband told everyone, and spent his first night as prime minister in the brass bed brought from his home in Islington, which was soon after replaced by a new bed costing £3,500 that had been bought by Cherie’s close friendand lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin. ‘And his lavatory is cracked!’ Cherie complained to Robin Butler, adding that she needed a new dustbin. In any other country, a leader’s request for household replacements would have been granted automatically, but Cherie’s haughty tone insulted Butler. Tact towards Downing Street officials, he noted, was alien to her. Unlike most of her predecessors, her prickly attitude towards the staff began the moment she entered Downing Street and dumped her bags at the entrance door, expecting someone to carry them upstairs. Her imperious manner sparked wry reminiscences about her raid on the No. 10 flat in the hours just before Brown arrived in Downing Street, ordering a sofa and a TV set to be pushed across the corridor into No. 11.
    The Blairs had already irritated officials over the time and money wasted even in advance of their arrival. Just before the election, Robin Butler had spent hours with them poring over the floor plans of the Downing Street accommodation. Dissatisfied, the Blairs decided to remain in Islington. The police and the security agencies built guard huts around the house and ordered bombproof glass for their home, only for Cherie, with little grace, to change her mind. The pattern would become familiar.
    Unflattering stories appeared in newspapers about her accompanying Blair to a summit abroad with a hairdresser and beautician. Irritated by the betrayal, Cherie fumed when the civil service asked for repayment of the costs. She also discovered the disadvantage of publicity. Each newspaper account describing her fixation with money would also mention her drunken, adulterous father, Tony Booth, a well-known, prickly actor who had abandoned his family when she was a child. Instead of remaining in the shadows like her predecessors, Cherie offered herself as a target. To avoid further embarrassment, Blair vetoed the new kitchen and offered to pay for the whole refurbishment.
    Arguments about money were compounded by the simultaneous dispute between Cherie and Blair about Anji Hunter, Blair’s girlfriend during his teenage years, who had been an intimate assistant since 1994.Cherie strenuously opposed Blair bringing Hunter into Downing Street. She had discovered an old collection of affectionate notes between him and his former flame in a cardboard box, and this sparked an irrational jealousy against the good-looking, well-turned-out blonde who, unlike herself, possessed ‘more than one dress’.
    In a succession of attacks, including one ferocious outburst in front of Hunter, at the end of which the prime minister’s wife stormed out of Blair’s office, Cherie demanded that the assistant be fired. Blair pleaded that a prime minister was entitled to employ people he trusted. His misery was aggravated by Fiona Millar, Campbell’s partner, who worked as Cherie’s personal assistant. Millar had promised to ‘keep Cherie biography-free’ by rejecting media requests to interview the prime minister’s wife. In the current dispute, she was angry that Campbell supported Blair.
    After a succession of exhausting arguments, Blair persuaded Cherie that Hunter be allowed to stay. Michael Levy, the party’s fund-raiser, was asked to broker a suitable job description for her with the civil service. (The irony lost on Blair was that Levy was worried about his own position: he hoped he would receive a peerage, but Mandelson was agitating against it.) Levy duly delivered the title ‘special assistant for presentation and planning’.
    To assuage her humiliation, Cherie sent Hunter a note outlining the restrictive terms of her employment: ‘In so far as your job brings you into contact with me, that will be kept to a minimum