NADINE DORRIES: What Cherie told me about life in the No10 goldfish bowl...
By Nadine Dorries, Daily Mail Published: 21:02 EDT, 8 July 2024 | Updated: 21:08 EDT, 8 July 2024 e-mail View comments As a new Member of Parliament back in 2005, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Cherie Blair to drop by for tea, a chat and a tour of No 10. It was my first glimpse into what life in Downing Street was like for a Prime Minister’s wife and I was astounded. No wonder she’d co-authored a book about it, called The Goldfish Bowl.
Cherie, who like me had young children at the time, was honest about the pressures of trying to maintain a normal family life when you live in a ‘fortress’. She told me she’d once tried to organise a takeaway meal as a treat one evening — but the order never made it through security checks! Cherie Blair and Nadine Dorries at a tea party in Downing Street in 2005 Cherie co-authored a book, The Goldfish Bowl, about what life was like as a PM's spouse Cherie Blair with Tony and their children outside No10 in 2001 Samantha Cameron has also described how hard it was to get supermarket deliveries, and said she would put on a hat to disguise herself and pop out through the back to get to Tesco Express at Westminster Tube station whenever she ran out of essentials. As Secretary of State I spent more time behind that famous front door and saw how such restrictions, as trivial as they might seem, were accompanied by a loss of privacy that must be hard .
