Family values, Labour style

The Tories will find it difficult to paint Cherie Booth as a left- wing liability for her husband. As John Rentoul reports, her religion could be more influential than her politics

"My name is Cherie. I am a mum and a barrister and I have recently become Queen's Counsel, which is very smart." That's the trouble with going to church these days - the minister might ask you to stand up in front of the congregation and say who you are. It happened on Sunday to Cherie Booth, who added her third role as an afterthought: "I am also married to this man here."

Ever since Glenys joined Neil Kinnock on the Brighton platform in 1983, to throw roses to the delegates who had just elected him, the leader's wife has had an awkward place in Labour's unwritten constitution. Before that the leader's wife played a passive, pastoral role. Harold Wilson's wife, Mary, wrote poetry. James Callaghan's wife, Audrey, took up good causes. Michael Foot's wife, Jill Craigie, despaired of the constraints of being a political wife, letting slip during the 1983 election campaign how little Michael liked being Labour leader.

Glenys changed all that. She was a political wife, deeply ambitious for herself and her husband. Charming, passionate, confident, Glenys nevertheless opened her husband up to criticism. Kinnock was deliberately protrayed as a presidential-style leader. That in turn made Glenys's influence upon him critical. The Conservatives made much of her role behind the scenes, casting her as the shadowy unelected figure.

Glenys's treatment may turn out to be mild compared with what could be waiting for Cherie. The Conservatives know how difficult it was for Bill Clinton to account for the influence Hillary has had within the White House. They believe they could do the same with Cherie. They think Cherie could be their secret weapon.

Hence the whispering campaign that began as soon as Tony Blair was elected Labour leader. As a Tory MP told a Labour backbencher in a Commons corridor, "He's never been under pressure before. We're going to destroy him. And we'll go for his wife." Tory MPs mutter that his wife is "much more left- wing than him", as well as "much more intelligent". It is not an edifying strategy, but could it work?

The Tory interest in Cherie is not entirely unjustified. Cherie is - more than Norma Major or Mary Wilson - a political wife. She was once, like Tony, an ambitious politician herself. She put herself forward as a potential Labour candidate to fight Shirley Williams in the Crosby by- election in 1981. It was the high point of the SDP's march out of the Labour Party. The eyes of the nation were on the election; Cherie clearly had an appetite for the fight and the publicity.

But she did not win the Labour nomination and, while Tony squeaked into Parliament at the last moment for the safe Labour seat of Sedgefield in 1983, she lost her deposit in the safe Tory seat of Thanet North.

Her political career did not come to an end straight away because she was elected to the executive of the "soft-left" pressure group the Labour Co-ordinating Committee after the general election, and stayed for two years. The LCC, which began life as a Tony Benn fan club, had become a platform for centre-left activists to become better known in the party as a step up into Parliament. Eight of her fellow committee members later became MPs, including the likes of Peter Hain, who has now positioned himself as a critic of the leadership.

However, Cherie, whose first child, Euan, was born in 1984, decided that one politician in the family was enough. According to friend and Islington neighbour Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, her priorities are now "family, work and politics, in that order". But, because the three cannot properly be separated, the nature of her political beliefs remains a matter of public interest.

She started out further to the left than her husband, according to friends. In 1983 she spoke on the same platform as Tony Benn as the candidate in Thanet, and said he had "inspired her in her quest for socialism". Her husband, by contrast, had refused to let Benn visit his Beaconsfield by- election campaign.

On the other hand, she was strongly opposed to the miners' strike in 1984-85, which was a controversial position in the party at the time. She supported the miners' cause, but - in contrast to Neil Kinnock's equivocation - she was against the strike because there had not been a ballot. Her Labour roots are deeper than her husband's. She joined the party when she was 16. Tony did not join until he was 22 (although, contrary to some stories, he joined before he met her). Unlike him, she was a socialist by background and through adversity.

Her famous father, Tony Booth, the "Scouse git" of Till Death Us Do Part, had abandoned her and her sister, Lyndsey, when they were young. His autobiography, Stroll On, makes no reference to his children, except to ask them for their forgiveness in the dedication. Nor does he mention Cherie's mother, Gale. At the time he was supposed to be married to her, his is a lewd account of his boisterous "crumpeteering".

Cherie owes a huge debt to her mother. In an emotional speech at her 40th birthday party last year, she paid tribute to the tough woman who brought her up, who gave up being an actress to take as many jobs as she could, including in a fish and chip shop. It is little wonder that she has such a passionate belief in the importance of family.

Gale, who is a close member of the extended family, comes from a working- class Labour background. Her father was a shot firer at the Ilkeston pit in Derbyshire, a shop steward, Labour activist and cornet player in the Salvation Army. Tony Blair's father recently joined the Labour Party but for years supported the Tories.

Yet Cherie's political beliefs may not be the most controversial influence upon her husband. That may be her religion. Although Tony Booth was not around when Cherie was young, his Liverpool mother made sure that Cherie and Lyndsey were brought up as Catholics. Cherie went to Seafield Convent Grammar School in Crosby - hence her claim to the Crosby nomination 10 years later.

Her education had a rather different impact on her, inspiring a serious- minded devotion that is, even more than her husband's Anglicanism, intensely private. Many of the Blairs' closest friends, of all religions and none, know little of either of their religious beliefs. "I've never had a discussion about religion with either of them," says Alan Haworth, a close friend for 15 years.

Barbara Roche, another friend from the LCC who is now an MP, says: "I'm Jewish and my husband is a Catholic. What we have in common [with the Blairs] is a strong moral framework, and that's very important for children."

The one thing that everyone knows about the Blairs' religion is that their children go to Catholic schools. This is where Cherie's religion sheds light on Tony Blair's values and the way he might conduct himself as prime minister. Euan goes to the London Oratory, a traditionalist Catholic boys' school, which opted out of local council control under Conservative legislation and is eight miles from the Blairs' Islington home. The Blairs seem to have an unusually balanced partnership. She is certainly, in one sense, more intelligent than him as well as being often tense and on edge where he can be relaxed, open and charming. Laid back is not a term one would use to describe Cherie.

She was academically brilliant, taking the top first in law at the London School of Economics and coming top in the Bar exams. Tony Blair, meanwhile, got an upper second class law degree at Oxford, and an undistinguished third class at the Bar. But then they found themselves in competition for a single place in the barristers' chambers of Derry Irvine, now Lord Irvine of Lairg. Instead of driving them apart, the situation brought them closer together. "I was with someone else at the time, but by the end of the pupillage I'd finished with him and started going out with Tony," she said. But it was he who was taken on, and she who had to find a place elsewhere.

And it was he who, through luck, charm and determination, got into Parliament. Since then, Cherie's role in his political career has been twofold. First, "she is particularly good at spotting the weaknesses in political arguments and thinking through problems", a friend says, although discretion prompts him to insist that she is "less interested in broader political strategy". Other friends say she is more "radical" than her husband, although this may be because he has learnt to be careful, even in private.

Secondly, she is strongly ambitious on his behalf. She pressed him to stand for the deputy leadership in 1992, before John Smith pushed his preferred candidate, Margaret Beckett, forward. And, after Smith's death in May last year, she was worried that Tony might defer to his "senior partner", Gordon Brown, although her worries turned out to be unfounded.

Her husband admitted to the congregation of the Dome Mission Methodist Church on Sunday: "I am Tony Blair. I am a father and I am leader of the Labour Party - I am not sure whether that's smart or not, but I do harbour ambitions."

That ambition must be something Cherie must like about him. But it will take a lot of work to portray her as more left-wing or more politically correct. She may seek fulfilment of her political ambitions through him. But she has a full-blown, highly demanding career of her own. If the Tories hope she is their secret weapon, their campaign is unlikely to be explosive.

'Tony Blair', by John Rentoul, is published by Little Brown, at pounds 16.99.