Published

2005

When your spouse becomes prime minister and the doors of No 10 Downing Street close behind you, every aspect of life is suddenly changed. This is what Cherie Booth discovered when her husband, Tony Blair, became Prime Minister in 1997.

With Cherie Booth, Cate Haste looks back at the experiences of previous occupants of No 10. Through interviews, diaries, correspondence and interviews with the surviving spouses they find what it was like to live in the public eye and at the hub of often turbulent and dramatic British and international political events from the 1950s to the 1990s. 

Spanning both the Conservative and Labour governments from Clarissa Eden through Mary Wilson to Denis Thatcher and Norma Major, they explore how each tackled being in the unaccustomed public spotlight, negotiating an often bewildering bureaucracy but without the prop of a defined role, and how they managed their family and married life, even as they observed events from the front row of history.