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Cherie cuts the ribbon with Alex Van Marle and daughter Evelyn, 15 months.
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Why Cherie misses walk to the shops
CHERIE Booth has spoken candidly about her life in Islington – she misses being able to walk to the shops – and her love of dining at Granita restaurant in Upper Street, where her PM husband and Gordon Brown famously carved up the Labour leadership.
Ms Booth talked exclusively to the Tribune after opening Willow Children’s Centre in Holbrooke Court, Holloway, on Wednesday.
When the Blairs lived in Richmond Crescent, Barnsbury, in the 1990s, they came under fire for not sending their children to Islington Green School, their local secondary.
Instead, they opted to ferry their two elder sons to the Roman Catholic London Oratory School in West Brompton.
In a rare glimpse into the life of Britain’s most powerful family, Ms Booth spoke of the couple’s reason for not sending their children to Islington Green.
She said: “Because I’m a Catholic I would always choose to send my son to a Catholic school. At one stage I was a governor of Islington Green.
“The reason we did not send our children to Islington Green was nothing to do with Islington Green but because we wanted to send our children to a Catholic school and there were no Catholic secondary schools.” Roman Catholic St Aloysius College in Archway is a short bus ride away.
Ms Booth was governor of “a number” of schools, including Highbury Fields girls school.
She defended her husband’s controversial city academies scheme – Islington is due to get two of the “super schools” – saying: “There’s going to be more choice for parents in Islington.”
Barrister Ms Booth also spoke about her chambers, Matrix, defending objectors who are pressing for a judicial review over plans for a new city academy at Islington Green.
She said: “A barrister’s job is to represent people’s cases. It’s got nothing to do with anything really.”
Then she turned on our reporter, demanding to know why he had failed to ask her about the new Willow children’s centre.
She asked: “Do you have any children of your own? So that’s why you don’t think Willow’s important? It’s rather sad I think if a man can’t think of anything interesting about children.”
At the opening she called the £1 million centre – one of 16 in the borough – a “special place where everybody works together”.
The centre provides nursery and pre-school care and education for up to 70 children aged from six months to five.
Ms Booth also revealed that she still visits the borough to see her sister and brother-in-law.
She said that she missed living in a community – “a community where you can walk down to the shops”. She added: “Now we live in a different sort of community.
“In many ways I would like to come back to Islington but we wanted somewhere near when my son goes to school.”
Ms Booth said the last restaurant she had visited in Islington was the Pasha Turkish in Upper Street.
But she still has fond memories of Granita, now a tex-mex restaurant, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown split up the Labour leadership between them.
When asked if she had ever eaten there, she said: “It’s dead now, isn’t it? In the old days, of course I did.”
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