Tony Blair’s Garden Room Girls “got everywhere”

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14th July, 2009

THE (10 DOWNING STREET) ‘GARDEN ROOM GIRLS’

BROADCAST – BBC Radio4 – 8th July, 2009

You can listen here but probably only for a few more hours. The BBC makes its  ‘listen again’ facility available for 7 days only.

Some of the elite band of secretaries who have worked at Downing Street over the last 50 years reveal their untold stories of life at Number 10 and how it operates. Interviewed for the first time, they talk to Naomi Grimley about working for Prime Ministers since Churchill, and Tony Blair discloses how the PM’s office could not work without them.

Blair excerpts:

NAOMI GRIMLEY: And Tony Blair will tell us about the special girls in his life.

TONY BLAIR:  Even if you felt like going and … y’ know … banging your head on the nearest wall, the garden rooms would be there as a sort of therapy, as it were.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  Linda, Tessa, Sue, Anne and Gillian are being shown around Number 10 by one of the current garden room girls. Incidentally, they’re called the ‘garden rooms’ because they look directly out onto the rose garden.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: Well what exactly does a garden room girl do? Well, typing and taking dictation were the traditional things. [...] A garden room girl also has to act like a travelling communications hub accompanying the Prime Minister wherever they may go. Tony Blair found this out in a peculiar  situation.

TONY BLAIR: They go absolutely everywhere, so they’re with you on holiday. They’re with you … when I had to go into hospital to have the procedure on my heart there were actually … a garden room girl came along for that, which is slightly bizzarre.  I don’t know quite what I was supposed to do…  y’ know…

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  Did she sit in the room with you?

TONY BLAIR:  Er … do you know … well, I mean … I was kind of knocked out for some of the time, but she sat just outside it, yes.  So if anything really urgent ever came up … y’ know … they had to be able to get in contact immediately with the prime minister.

NAOMI GRIMLEY: By the way during Tony Blair’s premiership there was even a ‘garden room boy’. Though, this is highly unusual because historically the office has been staffed by women. Ann Marie Bennett was one of Tony Blair’s girls and she describes the hectic nature of keeping up with him on the road.

ANN MARIE BENNETT:  We had mobile phones constantly stuck to our ears, y’ know … I’ve sort of typed in the back of cars and… y’ know …  while in convoy at 90 miles an hour … somebody rings through and said the PM wants to change the speech. So you literally get the laptop out and you’re trying to change the speech as you are going along and of course it’s not easy cos the laptop’s bouncing up and down. And I also get motion sickness so there’s been a few times where I’ve been in convoy … been trying to change the speech while also sort of trying to maintain my composure. We would be amending things right up to the second that the Prime Minister walked onto the podium and that happened all the time.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: In the olden days the garden room girls opened the correspondence all of it. Yes, ALL of it. It was only later under Tony Blair that a permanent correspondence unit was set up to handle it separately.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: After 18 years of Conservative government some of the garden room girls were more than a little apprehensive when new Labour and its many political advisers first arrived in 1997. But once that subsided the garden room girls rather took to Tony Blair and vice versa. In fact he found them a useful human barometer.

TONY BLAIR:  Every so often y’ know if they had been writing out a speech for me or typing a speech or you know typing out something or they just were a twitch of the eyebrows or a sort of  pursing of the lips I’d say “what’s wrong … what’s wrong” and they’d say “well, I don’t think … do you really want to say that?”. And I’d say “what do you mean” and they’d just give you a little explanation as to maybe why that wasn’t a very sensible thing to say or do. I mean they did it very gently and they’d only ever do it if I asked, as it were. But, I found on the odd occasion they would be extremely good as a sounding board or if you were telling a joke … was it funny or not funny … they’d be very quick to give their opinion.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: Years later and another Prime Minister and his team had to rush unexpectedly to America again because of an international emergency.  In the dust and trauma of 9/11 Tony Blair paid an emergency pilgrimage to New York with a garden room girl by his side.

ANN MARIE BENNETT: The traffic was awful in Manhattan on that day cos there was just so much going on.

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  Ann Marie Bennett had lived in New York herself for three years so she’d asked her colleagues if she could go on that particular trip, difficult though it was.

ANN MARIE BENNETT: It was just very emotional for me, very emotional. It was very emotional for everyone I think.  I can remember driving into the city and it was a misty day and y’ know the skyline was so different and … y’ know … I found myself with tears in my eyes.  And then we went to a mass at a catholic church for some of the victims and the PM went as well. It was just such an emotional thing for me.  And  I was … it was almost like I wanted to be there …  I needed to be there and I will always remember it … sorry… I’m a bit emotional.  I just felt very proud we were there … that the PM was there to give support to the victims’ families especially the British victims.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  The serious business of government sometimes descends into comedy. And Ann Marie Bennett our most recent garden room girl still laughs when she thinks of one particular weekend at the Prime Minister’s country retreat.

Clinton came to Chequers and em … they arrived by Airforce One helicopters and these guys were sort of  flying in at some sort of … you know… so co-ordinated … one would fly down, the other would fly down and then they’d sort of both landed on the grounds of Chequers and out walked Clinton with his 900 security guards and … y’ know … there was Cherie and Tony and what not.  So, that was fine and Clinton stayed the night and he left the next day. And again off he went with his great big helicopters flying in and out of each other and … almost loop the loop and off they go.  So everybody’s gone and there’s me and the PM and a couple of detectives and once all these people have left there’s just us trudging across the grass at Chequers. We get into this old army helicopter … y’ know … and we sort of sit down and we’re sitting on benches almost. We  sort of look at each other and just burst out laughing that here we’re now flying back to London in this old helicopter with the door open and hair blowing everywhere … and Clinton has just left with his great big show as he flies out of Chequers. It was just such a contrast.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: Perhaps it’s only once you’ve retired from it all like Tony Blair has now that you can laugh at those moments of unbearable tension before a make-or-break speech.

TONY BLAIR:  There was always something going wrong with the printer.  Y’ know, so the damn thing would break down and you’d be about to get on stage in five minutes and you didn’t have the speech and the thing was going to turn out as a complete catastrophe … there wasn’t a proper copy of the speech and they were there typing and what’s more you’d just discovered that in actual fact several of the facts were wrong and had to be changed and you weren’t happy with the ending and it had to be re-written.  So this is building up as the minutes and seconds are ticking away when you’re just about to go on stage.  At those points …  I mean … I found them really, really remarkably good.  Because, I mean there are lots of people who would at that point start screaming and run out of the room … and say they couldn’t take any more … cos … these would be live media occasions.

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  So despite the pressure you’ve never thrown a stapler in anger or anything like that?

TONY BLAIR:  Well, I can’t remember doing that  … I mean … maybe they, maybe they can but no, no I don’t think so.

NAOMI GRIMLEY:  Some people say your successor is a bit more grumpy around the office.

TONY BLAIR:  Well, I mean …  I don’t know cos I’m not there. But I’m sure he finds them as valuable as I did. And I really did actually, genuinely did.

[...]

NAOMI GRIMLEY: The garden room girls have told us about the public and the private moments of Downing Street, though I’m sure they’ve kept under wraps some stories which they’d never disclose to you or me. So it’s time to leave Number 10 now and let that big black door close once again on all the memories. But before we go Ann Marie Bennett reflects on why this programme means so much to garden room girls past and present.

ANN MARIE BENNETT:  They couldn’t do it without us. And I think it’s great for everybody to hear that if you put your mind to it you can achieve things … y’know, you can achieve things, and for me I got to be a garden room girl. That’s it.

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Tags: 10 Downing Street, Ann Marie Bennett, bbc radio 4, Naomi Grimley, The Garden Room Girls, to hospital for Blair's heart procedure, Tony Blair