One senior Tory told me how jealous he is of Sarah Brown's ability to work a room, systematically buttonholing the most important people in any gathering – he was thinking particularly of a News International party at which she wooed Rupert Murdoch and his satellites; charming them, apparently effortlessly, on behalf of her more lumpen husband. Watching her operate now, I know exactly what he means. Andrew Rawnsley's scabrous book The End of the Party, about the Brown government, has little criticism of her beyond noting that one member of Brown's team referred to her as 'Magda Goebbels'. 'She was a more skilled operator than either her husband or anyone else around him,' the journalist admitted. Cynics say that being an experienced PR executive helps when you're trying to get people eating out of your hand, but Sarah Brown does seem genuinely interested in every one of the women, both worthy and frivolous, gathered for tonight's good cause.
I am not sure, observing her pose for pictures, that she's enjoying the flashbulbs, but she's certainly taking them in her stride. It's the same feeling you get from watching her 2009 Labour Party Conference speech introducing Brown. ('He's messy. He's noisy. He gets up at a terrible hour. But I know he will always put you first. My husband, my hero.') She's an indomitable woman who can charm a party girl over Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, or an entire delegation of gnarled political activists over a lectern, and does both because it will help Gordon or the WRA or whatever else she believes is important.
Sarah Brown, like Cherie Blair before her, has three roles: wife, mother and career woman. But her husband seems harder to manage than Tony; her two boys, John, six, and Fraser, three, are younger than the Blairs' offspring, and Fraser has cystic fibrosis. And then there's the tricky career question. How does she balance all the competing demands, I ask. 'Like everyone else, imperfectly,' she sighs. Fearing similar accusations of conflict of interest to those that pursued the Countess of Wessex, in 2001 Brown abandoned her role at the 'integrity' PR company, Hobsbawm Macaulay, she founded with a school friend, Julia Hobsbawm, in 1993 and what time isn't now spent wooing Labour donor Lord Paul in his swimming pool, is devoted to her charity work. She is patron of five charities, and president of one, PiggyBankKids, which cares for ill and disadvantaged children in the UK, which she founded after her daughter Jennifer died at ten days old in 2002. Tonight, she's pitching up for the WRA in support of the 600,000 mothers in developing countries who die each year in childbirth or during pregnancy.
