Speaking for Myself (42 page)
Jackie was taking some well-earned rest with her family, so Maureen, our household help and babysitter, came along. Her surprisingly bluesy Scottish voice, coming from such a pint-size person, enlivened many an evening’s singing and playing by the local guitar wannabes, who naturally included Tony.
Among the mix of familiar faces was an English girl called Caroline, married to a Frenchman who ran a foie gras business. Euan’s examination results had just come through, and he had decided on Bristol University, a hundred or so miles west of London. While Caroline and I were chatting, she asked if I’d thought about buying something there for Euan rather than renting. The short answer was no, I hadn’t. Well, you should think about it, she said. Why throw money away on rent if you have the potential to buy? At least that way you could have capital growth. She had a friend in Bristol, called Sheila Murison, who taught at the university and, as a business sideline, bought places and then let them out to students. I decided it was certainly worth investigating, and I asked her to ask her friend to keep her eyes open. That night I mentioned it to Tony. I wasn’t supposed to talk about investments at all, but I thought a general question was reasonable. Did he think it was a good idea in principle? No, he didn’t. He thought it was ridiculous.
Well, it wasn’t his decision. The main reason for the blind trust was that I was the sole beneficiary, and the more I thought about it, the more doable it seemed.
I wasn’t much cheerier when the time came for Euan to go to Bristol. Within two months I had lost my last baby, and now I was losing my first. It may sound stupid and sentimental, but that was how it felt. It was thirty years exactly since I had pushed my poor old mum out the door of Passfield Hall, her face streaming with tears, and I remembered how embarrassed I had felt and how I’d just wanted her to go so that I could get on with my new life. Now here I was at another hall of residence. I didn’t cry when I said good-bye to Euan, although he clearly knew that tears weren’t far away, saying, “Mum, I think it’s time you left now.”
Tony, who hadn’t been able to come to Bristol, wasn’t exactly sympathetic to any of this. Iraq was looming ever larger, and the tension both in the flat and in Number 10 was palpable. Leo, delightful though he was, didn’t make life any easier. The phone would ring in the night, and Leo would wake up and cry. I’d get up and go to his room to comfort him, and as often as not, I’d end up lying beside him and falling asleep, squashed uncomfortably into the wooden bed designed as a racing car, waking a few hours later with numb limbs.
Shortly after I got back from France, Caroline’s friend Sheila got in touch, and we had an exchange of e-mails about what I was looking for in terms of a flat. I was thinking of two bedrooms, between £225,000 and £275,000. At the beginning of October she e-mailed me to say she’d found a development called the Panoramic, which I might be interested in, and she forwarded me the brochure. Although the list price for a two-bedroom, £295,000, was more than my maximum budget, she was thinking of buying one herself, and the builder had already quoted her a discounted price. As there were only five left of an original fifty-five, she was sure she could get this for me. And she did. On October 6 she said she’d negotiated a price of £269,000, a reduction of £26,000. She added that as a garage was included, the price could probably be structured to pay separately for that and thus get the flat itself below the £250,000 threshold, at which point certain taxes kicked in. Of course any such manipulation would clearly be tax evasion, and I couldn’t do that. Later it was claimed that I got a special discount, but that wasn’t the case.
I then discovered that the Web price was only £275,000 and e-mailed Sheila to say that the reduction was, therefore, only £6,000, and presumably we could do better than that. I left it in her hands, as I was about to accompany Tony on a trip to Moscow. He would be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks about Iraq following the publication two weeks previously of a dossier based on various intelligence agencies’ assessments of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
In the meantime the protection people had to look at the security implications of the flat. From their point of view it was fine. They did say, however, that if possible, it should be bought in another name, preferably that of a company. I told them it would be bought in the name of the trust. I had already spoken in principle to the trustees, and they were happy to release £100,000. I would fund the rest with a mortgage. I hadn’t intended to buy so quickly, but the money was sitting there. As I couldn’t speak to Tony about it, I asked Fiona what she thought.
“It’s a risk going to see it yourself,” she said. “Someone is bound to spot you.”
“I could always ask Carole to go for me.”
She shrugged and said, “Up to you.” Things between us were becoming really tense.
It worked out perfectly. Carole told me that she was going to Bath the following weekend with a friend, and Bristol was just down the road. I contacted the developers and made an appointment for her to see the flat with Euan. After all, he was the one who was going to be living there. As it happened, I couldn’t have gone anyway, as I was in Bermuda for a week on a commercial case, leaving on the nineteenth. When I called Carole to confirm the time, she said that she might take her friend along — her new man, she confessed, an Australian called Peter Foster. I said fine. I had guessed there was someone around — I’d recognized the signs — though she had been unusually coy.
She called me in Bermuda. She’d had a look at a couple of the flats and thought they were okay. Euan hadn’t gone with her in the end. “But,” she said, “I took my friend along. He’s a businessman and knows about these things, so I thought that could be useful. He thinks it’s a good deal. In fact, he’s thinking of getting one himself. Here, he can tell you.”
The new man came on the phone, confirmed what Carole had said, and added that he thought I could get the price down. I knew that already, of course, but I didn’t say so. He also told me, just as Sheila had, how with a bit of manipulation with the garage, I could avoid some taxes. Again I made it quite clear that I wasn’t interested. I thought he sounded a bit pushy, but I thanked him for his help, and that was that. Or so I thought.
Mea Culpa
A
week later, on October 28, the day after I got back from Bermuda, I had an e-mail from Peter Foster, the new man in Carole’s life, attaching copies of floor plans of the Panoramic. He appeared to have been talking to the developers on my behalf, which was ridiculous — Sheila Murison was handling all that. I supposed he had been talking to them anyway about his own possible purchase, and talking about mine as well strengthened his hand. In another e-mail, he put his mortgage broker in touch with me, and I passed the details on to my own accountant, whom I’d been with since 1982. Again there seemed little harm in it.
The business of the blind trust was very difficult. I couldn’t discuss it with Tony, yet I couldn’t spend a quarter of a million pounds on a stranger’s say-so, however much Carole might sing his praises, which she did nonstop. So I made an appointment the following Saturday to view the property myself. I also contacted a couple of real estate agents and arranged to see another place the same morning.
So I went. Two of the available flats were next door to each other, and it occurred to me that if I got both, I might trigger a discount. Then Euan could be in one, and I could let out the other. Mortgage rates were low, and I needed somehow to build up capital so we could eventually buy a house. I discussed the possibility there and then with the person showing me round and offered an overall figure of £430,000, which in the end was what I paid.
The next day an e-mail arrived from Peter Foster. Carole was obviously relaying everything that was going on, but given that she had just told me she was pregnant, this wasn’t the time to be prickly. I knew how much she longed for a baby, and my heart went out to her. This was probably her last chance. Her boyfriend was obviously pitching for a job, but the truth was that I didn’t have any need of him. In one of his e-mails, he said he knew some rental agencies, so to keep Carole happy and him out of my hair, I said he could forward me their details. I was puzzled by his wanting to get involved and started feeling distinctly uneasy.
The administrators of the trust agreed to allow £100,000 to be invested, and, as planned, I raised the rest by mortgage in the normal way through my bank. We exchanged contracts on November 22 and completed the deal a week after.
On Sunday, November 24, the Downing Street special protection officers received a report from colleagues in Cheshire. They’d had a tip-off: a convicted con man called Peter Foster was claiming he was involved with the Blairs through Carole Caplin. He planned to involve her in a scam concerning a diet tea, which had already landed him in prison. There was also some talk of involvement in a property deal, and he’d boasted that he’d met the Blairs’ son Euan. Then Alastair rang. He’d just had a call from a former newspaper colleague, Ian Monk, now working in PR. He was advising Carole and Peter Foster, he said. Foster had just lost a deportation case, and as Carole was now expecting his child, he was looking for “advice.” Foster also claimed he was being blackmailed, by the man who had tipped off the police about Foster’s questionable dealings, and having contacted the
News of the World,
they were planning to set up a “sting” — that is, to record a meeting between me and Carole and Peter Foster.
I felt sick, Tony was beside himself, and Alastair was merely grim. Sooner or later, probably sooner, he said, it would come out. For him this was the ultimate “I told you so.” Carole would now have to go. We saw Carole at Chequers that Sunday and confronted her with the information. She confessed that she knew all about Foster’s past but claimed that he was completely innocent: he’d been stitched up by the security services.
“Please, Carole,” Tony said, clearly exasperated. “This is ridiculous. The man is a fantasist. You’ve got to understand; we cannot be connected with a criminal.”
She then presented Tony with an extraordinary letter from a lawyer in Fiji, “putting into context” Foster’s shady past. This was hardly reassuring to anybody who had ever spent time around villains and criminals, as both Tony and I had done as barristers. It was classic stuff. To say he was dodgy would be putting it mildly, and we told her so.
“You’re talking about the father of my unborn child,” she said, and burst into tears. It was horrible. It was as if it had just occurred to her that if he went away, she’d be left literally holding the baby. Frankly, neither of us could spare the emotional energy. Tony had Iraq to contend with. Politically things were very hot, with antiwar groups becoming increasingly vociferous. The last thing he needed was this, and I knew it. I was supposed to be his support, not his undoing. As for me, in addition to my official engagements, for two weeks from November 25 to December 5, I was sitting as a recorder in Isleworth Crown Court. I also had late-afternoon appointments with former Prime Ministers’ wives for the book.
We told Carole that although it was her life, that man was never coming near any of us. It was all we could do. She agreed that she would keep away from Downing Street. Indeed, for the time being, I kept away from her entirely. This was a shock to both our systems: we had worked out together at the gym most days when I was in London for as long as I could remember.
On Saturday, November 28, the headline in the
Daily Mail
ran “Cherie’s Style Guru Has Fallen for a Fraudster.” That afternoon the
Mail on Sunday
sent through a list of twenty-two questions to the Downing Street press office, all Foster related. It was horrendous, and Tony was fuming.
“I told you not to buy any bloody flats.”
“He had nothing to do with the bloody flats. I have never met the guy. He has never been here; he has never been to Downing Street. What more can I say? I can’t believe you’d believe a convicted con man rather than your own wife! Telling lies is what the man does for a living!”
“So you categorically deny you have had any contact?”
“Apart from a few e-mails, no. I’ll show them to you if you like.” Technology and Tony are like oil and water, and waving that offer aside, he dashed off the form, filling in yeses and nos — mostly nos — then faxed it back. Unfortunately I think he told Alastair in very firm terms that I’d had no contact with Foster whatsoever — a version that Alastair confidently relayed to the press. I didn’t talk to Alastair at all.
For the next few days a stream of denials issued from Downing Street. Then, on Thursday, December 5, the
Daily Mail
published the exchange of e-mails between Peter Foster and me. Alastair’s look of superior satisfaction changed completely. I had never seen him so angry. As he saw it, he had lied to save my face, and he was determined that if anyone went down for this, it wasn’t going to be Alastair Campbell.
That morning Hilary Coffman came to my bedroom while André was doing my hair. She knew time was short: I had to be in court at Isleworth at 9:30 a.m. Within seconds she was giving me the third degree, clearly on instructions. I have known her for a long time as a faithful servant of the Labour Party, and she was clearly uncomfortable about doing it, not least because she was a friend of mine professing not to accept what I was saying.
“But Hilary, don’t you see, there isn’t a scandal. It’s you lot who are making it into a scandal. Look, I’ve used my own money to buy two flats. I’ve paid the going rate for them. Nobody paid £295,000. Okay, so I got a discount on the published price, but that’s standard — it’s a marketing ploy to make you feel you’ve got a bargain. No, I didn’t know him. No, I have never met him — I once said hello to him in passing at the gym. No, he has never met Euan. No, he has never been to Chequers. No, I did not ask him to help me avoid paying stamp duty. No, he was not my financial adviser. No, I did not find him a barrister. No, I did not intervene with immigration or any government official or legal representative on his behalf. No, no, no, no, NO, NO.”
