Cherie: My lost baby and Iraq panic

In the latest extract of her autobiography serialised in The Times and The Sun newspapers, she describes how Tony Blair and his press chief Alastair Campbell insisted that the press were informed almost immediately in 2002.

She said that Mr Blair had feared that if they had cancelled a family holiday they had been due to take without explanation, it could have triggered false speculation that an invasion of Iraq was imminent.

After Mrs Blair told her husband on the telephone that the hospital scan had found that the baby was dead, he broke the news to the rest of the family, before informing Mr Campbell.

Shortly afterwards Mr Blair and Mr Campbell rang back to say that with speculation mounting that troops could be sent to Iraq, it could send the wrong signal if they just cancelled the holiday.

Therefore, they said, the best thing was to tell the press.

"I couldn't believe it. There I was bleeding, and they were talking about what was going to be the line to the press. I put down the receiver and lay there staring at the ceiling as the pain began to grip," she wrote.

She also revealed how she and Mr Blair conceived their fourth child, Leo, while they were guests of the Queen at Balmoral in 1999. That autumn she began to suspect she might be pregnant.

"A few weeks before, we had been on the usual prime ministerial visit to Balmoral. The first year we had actually stayed - in 1998 - I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables," she wrote.