Tony Blair's underwear

January 20, 1998

The Washington Post

30th November 1997

Some people bring home strays. My mother brings home orphans. By orphans, I do not mean young, parentless children whom my mother raises as her own; I mean adults, or even whole families. The people my mother collects are circumstantial orphans-they are new in town, their accommodation fell through, they just moved into a house and have nothing to eat, a spouse is away, or some other situation that leaves them in need of, well, a mother.

Many of these orphans are men, which says something about the charm my Southern-bred mother possesses. They range from handyman types to visiting diplomats; you just never know who is going to be under her wing at any given time.

Some of these orphans become long-time friends, but many enter and leave my mother's life with the arrival and passage of some crisis. They depart and she wonders about them for years. But some go on to do great things that she later hears about.

Like Tony.

When Tony Blair was elected in a landslide last spring and my mother recounted her history with him (about which I had known nothing) I almost did not believe it. Then again, this was my mother.

Now every time I see Blair in the news-mourning Diana, negotiating peace-I think about his dirty laundry, which is different from that of most politicians. It also reminds me how much is lost when we close ourselves to chance encounters, avoiding or fearing stray humans instead of embracing them. Why complicate our lives? Because, to my mother's way of thinking, that is part of why we are here.

My mother picks up many of these people through her activities as a real estate agent. This part of her life was immortalised recently in a book written by Beppe Severgnini, an Italian journalist who came with his wife to Washington for a year and fell under my mother's care from almost his first day here. He went home and wrote Un Italiano in America, the Italian equivalent of A Year in Provence, in which he detailed several of his dealings with my "sweetly authoritative" mother.

Anyway, back to Tony Blair.

Ten years ago or so, Blair was a Member of Parliament and came to Washington on his way to West Virginia to tour coal mines. The trip was organised by the AFL-CIO, which housed Blair, his wife, his two young children and a nanny in a Washington DC hotel. But the family wanted to find somewhere a little more relaxed to stay on this Labor Day weekend, so my mother got a call from a friend who organises tours, who wanted to know if she could find the visitors an apartment for the weekend. My mother duly found them a flat on Capitol Hill, picked them up and drove them there.

It being Labor Day, she also invited the Blairs over for a barbecue. This being America, she also suggested they bring their laundry. They were undoubtedly too shocked to turn her down.

When the Blairs showed up for dinner, bags of laundry in tow, Tony Blair and my mother got to work loading the washer-installed in a room off the bedroom (why trudge to the basement?). "Utterly down to earth" is how she described him.

After dinner, my mother insisted that the Blairs borrow my parents' enormous green Ford that, to a Brit, must have looked like a tank. This way, my mother explained, they could make their own schedule in West Virginia and have a look, perhaps, at Skyline Drive.

Days later the Blairs returned, dropped off the car, thanked my mother profusely and made their way back home. "Come to England!" they said. "We'll give you a tour of parliament!"

But the way these things often work out, you don't take people up on their offers. My mother moved on, and like many men before him, Tony Blair became just another in a long list of orphans I never even knew my mother had. Until one day he got famous, and I got to tell the tale.