Blair Says He’ll Deliver on Promise to Help With Baby

LONDON —  Call it a busman’s paternity leave.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that when his 45-year-old wife, Cherie Booth, gives birth to their fourth child next month, he will go into “holiday mode” for a time, canceling public engagements but otherwise running the country.

Any parent knows that having a newborn is no holiday, so Blair’s announcement Sunday sounded a little implausible. Like having your baby and sleeping too.

Or like taking paternity leave and not taking it.

“I don’t ever stop being prime minister,” Blair said in an interview with the Observer newspaper. “Even when I am on holiday I do several hours of work a day. But of course I want to spend more time with Cherie when the kid is born and to help out, and I will do that. I don’t know if that makes [it] paternity leave--but it is just the common sense of the situation.”

The situation is that last month, Booth--an attorney specializing in employment law--put the father of “new Labor” on the spot. She told a legal forum that Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen had just taken a weeklong leave to help care for his newborn daughter, adding, “I, for one, am promoting the widespread adoption of this fine example.”

A Sticky Political Situation

While Booth received support from the female members of Parliament and working mothers in general, business leaders winced and conservatives harrumphed over what they clearly thought was a wimpy idea.

Suddenly, Blair, 46, was put at risk of either looking callous to female voters a year before national elections or making himself vulnerable to the Tory opposition, which could attack him for abandoning his duties while the Northern Ireland peace process is in free fall and other matters of state await his attention.

Next month, Labor is expected to lose the London mayoral election to one of its own dissidents, and auto workers at Rover Group Ltd. are likely to be laid off. If he is home changing diapers, the prime minister might just look . . . dispensable.

Blair said he would seek a “third way”--a reference to his centrist political course between free market conservatives and big government old Labor. The solution he came up with was a working paternity leave.

“I would be kidding you if I was to say for X period of time I’m not going to pick up the phone, I’m not going to talk to anyone, if there’s a crisis in the country or the world that I’m not going to be interested,” the prime minister told the Observer.

“That’s ridiculous. You can’t do that in my job. The important thing is to help Cherie and the baby. I obviously will try as much as possible to cut down in that period what I’m doing. But I have to run the country. That still has to go on,” he said.

He did not say how long that period of cutting down and helping will be, although Blair has a good record as a hands-on dad to the couple’s three other children, Euan, 16, Nicholas, 14, and Kathryn, 12. While in the opposition, Blair and other Labor members of Parliament occasionally were given permission to miss votes for family reasons.

Booth was not available Sunday for comment about her husband’s third-way solution. A spokeswoman for the prime minister’s office said, “She’s perfectly happy with the arrangements.”

With a May 24 due date, Booth is planning to pare her schedule after Easter and to take three to four months off from her full-time job once the baby is born. Among her current clients is Britain’s Trades Union Congress, which is challenging Blair’s government in court on the issue of paternity leave.

Mixed Reaction in the Media

In December, in an effort to comply with European standards, Britain changed its law to give fathers the right to take as much as three months of unpaid leave from work at any time until a child’s fifth birthday. The TUC says the new regulations violate European law because they exclude more than 3 million parents of children under 5 born before Dec. 15.

Blair’s decision to take even a limited paternity leave was lauded by Mary Ann Sieghart, a columnist for the Times of London, who said it sent the right message to prime ministers and fathers alike.

“I think it’s great. He’s not abandoning the country, and he’ll spend more time with his wife and baby. I think it’s perfect,” Sieghart said.

Those who oppose the move, she added, are primarily men “who think their own wives are going to tell them to take a leave too.”

But Ann Leslie of the Daily Mail said she thought Blair would simply “cut out the odd photo op” while continuing to work at home, a gesture that will amount to “a load of nonsense.”

“Cherie Blair is rich, and they can afford as many nannies as they want. It’s in the ordinary families, where there are no nannies, that a wife needs her husband,” Leslie said.

On second thought, she added: “If you’re feeling a bit shattered, I don’t know if you really want your husband around. A woman probably wants her sister and her best friend.”

All the paternity issue proves, Leslie said, is that “being prime minister is something you can do from home.”

Feminists would disagree--as, apparently, would Booth. In her speech last month, Booth said, “It is time that men started to challenge the assumption that the nurturing of children has nothing to do with them.”

In their efforts to protect their children, the Blairs have jealously guarded the family’s privacy. In the Observer, the prime minister said that although they expect initial media attention after the baby is born, they have “absolutely no desire to be treated like the royal family” by the press.

When the interviewer, Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed, volunteered that he and his wife are expecting their first child next month, Blair became the experienced father offering advice.

“You’ll be ready for a rest after two days of it,” Blair said. “You’ll be ready for a rest by going back to work. Looking after a baby is a darn sight harder than anything else you will do.”