Remembering Kate Gross: Tony Blair's former aide died on Christmas day aged 36

She was writing the Queen's speech in her twenties, as well as advising Tony Blair as his private secretary for Home Affairs, and founding a charity for Africa. Tom Peck remembers his friend's remarkable wife

Tom Peck
Wednesday 07 January 2015 23:00 GMT
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Gross wrote a book - 'Late Fragments' - before she died
Gross wrote a book - 'Late Fragments' - before she died

It is after a poem by Raymond Carver that Kate Gross named her book, Late Fragments.

"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did." It asks, in its first line.

"Did you get what you wanted?" They are words you hear a lot at this time of year, as children go back to school and compare their Christmas hordes

Kate's five-year-old twins, Oscar and Isaac, her "darling, consumerist selfish little boys" as she cheerfully called them in her final piece of writing, did get what they wanted, in a sense.

The plastic Minecraft figures she wrote of having "bought under duress" as she prepared for her final Christmas were there under the tree.

Eventually, they will find out that their main present, however, is the quite remarkable book their mother has left them. "There are two copies of this book that matter," she has written on its opening page. "There are two pairs of eyes I imagine reading every word. There are two adult hands which I hope will hold a battered paperback when others have long forgotten me and what I have to say."

This article began life as a simple book review, which I had hoped would be published in time for Kate to read. But she died on Christmas Day, aged 36, a few minutes before Oscar and Isaac came running down the stairs asking, "Is it morning?", and two years after discovering that she had colon cancer.

Among the first people to pay tribute to her was Tony Blair. She had worked at 10 Downing Street as his Private Secretary for Parliamentary and Home Affairs while still in her twenties. A more unlikely source of praise to emerge has been Damian McBride, the most ultra-loyal Gordon Brownite there is.

"The best and brightest firework on Bonfire Night," he wrote last week. "She was utterly brilliant, almost mesmerising in her command of the facts and of Gordon's brain, and reduced the rest of us – the supposed experts in working with the man – to stunned silence on the sidelines."

I never saw her in action, not like that anyway. I only have a few facts to place the scale of her prodigious talents in some sort of context. I was living with my friend Billy, who would become her husband, when they first met 12 years ago. She would have been 25 at the time. Already among her tasks was to write the Queen's speech for the state opening of Parliament.

If memory serves, it would have been that year that she found herself having to organise some sort of Christmas party for her team. It was not proving straightforward. The year before, the previous head had invited everyone round for dinner at her large home in the countryside, which is where people who run things in Downing Street tend to live.

Kate, on the other hand, was in her mid-twenties and dividing her time between a flat with her mates, somewhere near Clapham, I believe, and our place in north London. We were a collection of four student doctors, plus various other hangers-on such as Billy and I in a huge suburban house, fortuitously made available by the timely demise of one of our number's very elderly granny. And in the garden there was Matt, an entirely unreconstructed Neil from The Young Ones, who had been forced to curtail his travels round India selling jewellery made of hemp after contracting a rare, debilitating form of diarrhoea, and was living temporarily in our back garden in his Mongolian nomadic desert tent, occasionally crapping into plastic pots to parcel up and post to specialists in tropical medicine.

This was the environment in which New Labour's plans were translated into Royal voice. It's possible that our house was even suggested as a location for this Christmas meal, which in the end I believe took place at a restaurant in Chinatown.

"Did you get what you wanted from this life?" The obvious answer, in Kate's case, is no. What she wanted was to watch her boys grow up. But the reason that she did so much and achieved so much in such a short time, at least as far as I can tell, is that she would never have phrased the question to herself quite in this way.

Most children are consumerist and selfish in their own endearing way, but so too are most adults. Kate was not. Back in the early 2000s when she left Oxford, the banks, the consultancies and the law firms had the place practically on lockdown, vacuuming up the type of people who were out to get what they wanted. Kate would have been a prized acquisition. She became comically exasperated over the last year, she said, of "people using the news of my early demise as a chance to beatify me". But certainly she was more interested in what she had to give.

As the founder and CEO of the Africa Governance Initiative, of which Tony Blair was patron, she was acutely aware that, had she not been ill, she would have spent much of the last year in Sierra Leone where an early and more agonising demise has met so many people, and created so many orphans.

At the start of her book, she even repeats a surprising question that someone once asked her: "What was the best thing cancer had given me?"

She wrote of a "feeling of being alive, awake", a sudden sense of perspicacity. Of how the words that now make up the book suddenly came pouring out. Anyone who knew her, both before she became ill and after, quickly came to realise she had the truest form of intelligence there is. That power to see just that little bit further than most people, to bring clarity to an idea or to a conversation that for most other people had begun to blur on the boundaries of their horizon.

For everyone else, the best thing Kate's cancer has given us is her words. Late Fragments is not merely about living and dying at far too young an age. It is about the joy of family and friends, of falling in love. It is the story of a truly remarkable person in her own remarkable voice, seen and expressed with a depth of which few are capable. Had she lived the long and extraordinary life she was destined for, it is a tale she might have shared only with her grandchildren, if anyone at all.

'Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life)' by Kate Gross (William Collins, £14.99) is out now

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