There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’.
I knew things were pretty bizarre in Berlin towards the end, with the Nazis legalising nudism and stores holding spring sales as the Russian tanks rolled in, but for Cyril Connolly to have had a cultural correspondent in the enemy capital at the end of a world war would have been the supernova of aestheticism. And a very catastrophic one for Lady Eden.
Alas, it was probably just the busy authors not having time to read their proofs. As Mrs Blair writes in her foreword, she only started this book when she found herself ‘unexpectedly pregnant again’ in 2002, and thought she might have time on her hands. I found that admission terrifying, also curiously innocent: an interruption in her schedules spelled authorship. And, despite miscarrying, she went on with it, clearing a space among the expelled school bullies and the free-rail-ticket-seeking lesbians of her professional career.
To help her she called in Cate Haste, Lady Bragg in unreal life, author of Nazi Women and Sex in Britain: WW1 to the Present, to help her write about the experience of living in No. 10 from the point of view of late 20th-century prime ministerial consorts. I enjoyed it. At least I enjoyed most of it.
Who wrote what is not made clear, though occasionally it is possible to detect a dead, worthy hand when it comes to the odd political gloss, as in this celebrating the arrival of the Wilsons. Harold and Mary
came from a class that had made its voice heard loudly in British politics since the mid-19th century, the powerful working-class and bourgeois tradition of provincial Noncon- formism, which had provided a host of educationalists, reformers, trade union leaders and fighting politicians.
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