TONY BLAIR has been embarrassed by his wife’s displays of open animosity towards President Bush, according to a forthcoming biography of the Prime Minister.
Cherie Blair is said to have made no secret of her conviction that Mr Bush “stole” the presidential election, and picked an argument with him over the death penalty during a private dinner. Although the Prime Minister was pragmatic about Mr Bush’s victory, Mrs Blair was far less sanguine about the Supreme Court decision that gave him the keys to the White House. She believed Al Gore had been “robbed” of the presidency and was hostile to the idea of her husband “cosying” up to the new President.
Even as they flew to Washington for their first meeting with the presidential couple, Mrs Blair was in no mood to curry favour, the book Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader by Philip Stephens, states. “Cherie Blair still believed that Bush had stolen the White House from Gore,” he wrote. She asked more than once during the journey why they had to be so nice to “these people”.
Mrs Blair scarcely concealed her impatience as the Blair team debated on the plane whether the gift he had brought for the President, a bust of Winston Churchill, was of sufficient quality for the Oval Office. They decided to find a better one and that Mr Blair would tell the President it was on its way. Mrs Blair was annoyed at the fuss but was overruled. Another bust was delivered months later.
The book’s disclosures of Mrs Blair’s forthright views will cause embarrassment in Downing Street, because of Mr Blair’s good working relations with Mr Bush, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although they will not surprise officials or ministers who know her well. She is known for expressing her views forcefully in private.
Stephens writes that Mrs Blair behaved impeccably at her first meeting with the President “for all her outspoken resentment on the flight” and “to the great relief of her husband and aides” she had been at pains to make friends with Laura Bush.
But when the Bushes came to Britain in the summer of 2001, Mrs Blair, “more tribal in her politics than Tony”, according to a close family friend, embarrassed her husband. As the two couples sat down to dinner, with the officials no longer there, Mrs Blair could not resist an argument. She is a human rights lawyer and turned to the death penalty, a subject on which she has blunt views.
Judicial executions were an immoral violation of human rights, an affront under the US Constitution as much as under European laws to the fundamental principles of justice, she said. This opinion was delivered to a man who as Governor of Texas signed warrants for more than 150 executions.
Mr Blair was reported to have “squirmed”, even though he shares her opposition to the death penalty. The author says that when he asked Mr Blair about the incident during research for the book he looked uncomfortable — all he would say was that Cherie had raised the issue but as far as he was concerned the United States and Britain simply had different systems.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “She has always had a good relationship with President Bush and has of course discussed many issues with him, including capital punishment. The discussions have always been good-natured.”
Stephens also states that later in the evening Mr Bush had been embarrassed by his wife. Laura Bush had made it clear that her views on abortion were a great deal more liberal than his.
Mrs Blair, who is writing a book about prime ministers’ spouses, has made her forthright views known several times in situations that have caused alarm at No 10. She issued an apology after saying during a visit to Britain by Queen Rania of Jordan in June 2002 that young Palestinians “feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up”. Last month she said that “Saudi Arabia’s image in the world is appalling” over its treatment of women, in a speech in front of the Saudi Ambassador.
Stephens’s book also reveals the coolness shown by Vice- President Cheney in his early meetings with Mr Blair and how Mr Cheney showed his hostility later on to Mr Blair’s efforts to persuade Mr Bush to work through the UN before war against Iraq. He made “occasional, acid” interventions during the crucial Camp David summit and “during the following days and months he would be the constant disrupting force in the Anglo-American relationship”. Stephens adds: “If Donald Rumsfeld discomfited Blair with his public disdain for multilateralism, Cheney sought to undermine the Prime Minister privately.”
Stephens is a political columnist on the Financial Times and the paper’s former political editor. His 250-page biography of Mr Blair was commissioned by the publishers Viking to meet an urgent demand from Americans for more information about the Prime Minister and his family. Since Mr Blair became Mr Bush’s closest ally in the war on terrorism he has become universally popular with Americans, not least for his ability to describe al-Qaeda’s threat with an eloquence that the President cannot match.
There has been widespread concern among Americans that Mr Blair’s intimate support for President Bush might have damaged his prospects of re-election.
The book is published in America on February 5 and is expected to sell well in the Anglophile cities of New York and Washington.
