Meeting Cherie…

I met Cherie Blair last week, at a reception in London. She came in the door and I was introduced, among other guests. "Oh," she said, "I love that," pointing to a slightly flashy cocktail hat I was wearing at the time, a confection of black tulle, designed to hide the fact that I hadn't been to the hairdresser. "Oh yes," she repeated, " I like that very much."

I wondered if I was supposed to give it to her as a gift. There was a Queen Mary (the wife of George V, died 1953) and every time she admired something someone possessed, they were expected to give it to her. Is that the form, I wondered?

But Cherie's hair was too sleek and well-coiffed to be mussed up with a cocktail hat. I should have said that, but typically, only thought of it afterwards.

She looks well, Mrs Blair. Her skin is good, and, at 51, remarkably unlined. The camera does lie: it emphasises certain characteristics which real life does not. Cherie's mouth, which looks wide and prominent in pictures, and grotesque in cartoons, is not what you notice in the flesh: but the intelligent and watchful eyes.

Mrs Blair was the special guest at an unusual little soirée at the Atheneum Club in honour of G.K. Chesterton, the writer who died nearly 70 years ago. Chesterton, poet, novelist, essayist, and Catholic apologist, retains a loyal following and the Chesterton Institute, based at the University of New Jersey, and with links in Oxford, holds various events to promote his work and to publish lesser-known aspects of it.

It turns out that Cherie is a great Chesterton fan, which surprised me. Cherie and Tony are always up for everything that is so modern, and Tony wants to go down in history as the great moderniser of the British Labour Party. While Chesterton used the word "modern" as a stick to mock.

She wore a sort of floral frock with a long jacket over it, and high-heeled boots: and she spoke, in a light Liverpool accent, of how the nuns at her primary school taught her to recite "Lepanto", and other poems by Chesterton, and how much she valued this memory.

"Chesterton," she said, "knew that in a world full of trashy values, we must cherish spiritual things."

I was surprised by the commitment with which she spoke. My prejudices softened. I had read so much about Cherie being a freeloader, Cherie being in thrall to her personal Rasputin - her health trainer, Carole Caplin - Cherie charging £5,000 for every personal appearance, Cherie the ambitious-as-hell Queen's Counsel lawyer pulling in £300,000 a year… that it rather astonished me to watch this unpretentious woman with a serious interest in a Catholic writer whom some might describe as a right-wing traditionalist. (He wasn't; he was too engaged by paradox to be catagorised as either right or left.)

She went on quoting Chesterton and his witty sayings: that "progressives existed in order to make mistakes, and conservatives existed in order to see that these mistakes were never rectified". She talked, then, about the Rosary, and how her five-year-old son, Leo, was just learning about the Rosary, and how she valued that.

She talked about the role of faith in justice and peace, and the consideration for the poor, which Chesterton had understood.

She emphasised, again, how much she had appreciated the teaching of the nuns at her Liverpool convent - St Edmund's.

Understandably, too. Cherie Booth had a childhood marked by a broken home. Her much-married father, the actor Tony Booth, was a hell-raiser who must have brought excitement into the lives of his various children by different wives, but he certainly did not bring stability.

Her mother, Gale, struggled as a single parent, and Cherie, the clever little girl, found the fulfilment and stability that she yearned for in her convent education.

And with the nuns' encouragement, Cherie rose to be one of the most successful lawyers in England, and the wife of the Prime Minister.

"And," she added, in her Chesteron talk, "the first Catholic First Lady in Ten, Downing Street." A bit of a cheeky Scouse inflection there, but a bit of determination, too.

She was impressive, I thought. Genuine. She did the gig for no money, and no particular kudos, but because she remembered the Liverpool nuns who had introduced her to the joy of learning "Lepanto".

I liked her intelligence and commitment, and she liked my cocktail hat. But then, a Scouser always like a little touch of the flash, be they ever so serious in their other endeavours. ENDS.

Irish Independent Magazine: 22 October 2005.