- Euan Blair, 29, is marrying long-term girlfriend Suzanne Ashman, 25
- Wedding will be held at Tony and Cherie's Buckinghamshire mansion
- Her stepmother, weather girl Sian Lloyd, has been 'uninvited'
- His 'aunt' Cherie's half-sister Lauren Booth is expected to be a no-show
By PAUL SCOTT
The happy couple: Euan Blair is marrying Suzanne Ashman on Saturday
During the long months of planning, who would blame Cherie Blair if she had, on occasion, got lost in misty-eyed reveries when contemplating her son Euan’s wedding this afternoon.
No doubt she allowed herself a smile of satisfaction at the thought of her guests clinking glasses on her beautifully manicured, sun-dappled lawn as her eldest son celebrates his marriage to his long-time girlfriend.
After all, on paper at least, everything is set fair. The venue is South Pavilion, the £5.75 million Grade I-listed mansion in the lush Buckinghamshire countryside that Cherie shares with her husband, Tony.
Nor could the blushing bride, Suzanne Ashman, 25, be any more suitable.
Pretty and brainy, she is an Oxford graduate with a multi-millionaire father.
Then there is a guest-list that includes royalty — an Italian prince and his wife. What could possibly go wrong?
Sadly, when it comes to family weddings, giddy expectation so often gives way to fraught reality.
To start with, Cherie has been fretting about the weather. Rather optimistically, it seems, she had been relying on the sun shining on her 170 guests as they mill around in the vast garden during the four-hour gap between the 3.45pm service and the start of dinner in a specially-erected marquee.
All this week, she has been glued to her iPad, looking at weather forecasts which have ominously predicted that the heavens are expected to open.
How, she has asked friends, is everyone going to shelter from the rain in the giant tent while the caterers are trying to lay tables?
And that is not the half of it. Yesterday, the Mail revealed that the bride’s stepmother, TV weathergirl Sian Lloyd, has been mysteriously barred from the wedding.
The reason, I can reveal, is that she has had a massive, tearful falling-out with Suzanne over comments Miss Lloyd made about her mother.
Nor has Miss Lloyd given up on the idea of attending without a fight, and there are suggestions she will still turn up regardless. However, it seems that even if the bride relents, she will not be given a place on the top table.
Excluding: Euan and Suzanne, pictured in 2009, has allegedly banned the bride's step-mother Sian Lloyd from Saturday's nuptials
Uninvited: Sian Lloyd, who married Suzanne Ashman's father Jonathan in 2007, allegedly made a comment about Suzanne's mother
The problem began, I gather, at a recent pre-wedding dinner party attended by 29-year-old groom Euan, Suzanne, her father (motor-racing entrepreneur Jonathan Ashman) and his second wife, Miss Lloyd.
It seems that Welsh-born Miss Lloyd, 55, inadvertently made a comment about the bride’s Turkish mother, Sedef — Mr Ashman’s first wife — that Suzanne took the wrong way.
‘I don’t think Sian meant anything by it, but Suzanne was in floods of tears,’ I was told.
‘It’s just the sort of typical misunderstanding that happens in the run-up to a big wedding. Everyone thought the issue would settle down but Suzanne said she didn’t want Sian at the wedding.’
Miss Lloyd’s one-time fiancé, the flamboyant ex-Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, says he is ‘not surprised’ that she has been ‘uninvited’ and suggested there were several reasons. Admittedly he offered no proof that Miss Lloyd ever uttered the remark, but said that Tony Blair may have heard her comment that she thought him a ‘war criminal’ and didn’t like his policies. He added: ‘There is a comic-tragic irony that she now is to be related to him in the future.’
Meanwhile, Mrs Blair, 58, tried to escape the fray by taking her 25-year-old daughter Kathryn with her to a spa in Sicily last month to prepare for the big day.
Indeed, she has been making plans for the wedding ever since Euan and Suzanne got engaged at Christmas.
There has been so much to arrange. For instance, the Blairs’ youngest child, the musically-gifted Leo, 13, must be rushed back home from London where he is due to spend this morning rehearsing a production of The Magic Flute.
The young singer made his West End debut in the chorus of Bizet’s Carmen last year. No wonder, given all this angst, that paterfamilias Tony — wisely — has stayed well out of the way over the last week. He has been abroad (as usual) on business and was due to fly home only yesterday.
Among their guests is, I am told, the Italian Prince Girolamo Strozzi and his wife Irina.
A friend of the family, he became headline news in 2006 when Blair was PM and accepted a freebie holiday with the prince’s family — one of several the Blairs have taken with them — at his 16th-century Tuscan palace Villa Cusona, set in the hills of Chianti near the walled town of San Gimignano.
In May, an Italian magistrate took possession of the estate over an ongoing fraud inquiry, though the 75-year-old aristocrat denies any wrongdoing.
Wedding: Tony and Cherie Blair's son Euan is marrying Suzanne Ashman and the party afterwards is taking place at the family mansion in Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire
The Blair mansion: South Pavilion, in Wotton Underwood, where the wedding party will take place
Also invited is Lord Levy, the controversial former Labour-fundraiser who was embroiled in the so-called cash-for-peerages scandal that engulfed the party in 2006. But it has been suggested that the peer might not be able to attend as the wedding falls on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.
There is also talk that the groom has invited senior officials from the West Midlands Labour Party. For the Bristol University graduate is keen to follow in his 60-year-old father’s footsteps and wants to become an MP.
He is said to have targeted two safe seats in Coventry, where he hopes to be selected as a candidate to fight the 2015 election.
One is due to be vacated by former Labour minister Bob Ainsworth and the other is currently held by Geoffrey Robinson — Tony Blair’s millionaire old pal who controversially lent Peter Mandelson £373,000 to buy a house — who will be nearly 77 come the election.
Last year, Euan gave up his well-paid job as a merchant banker with Morgan Stanley in London to take on the role of business development manager at Sarina Russo Job Access — an employment agency in Coventry involved in the Government’s flagship Work Programme.
He has helped canvass for Labour, for example in the Corby by-election last year. Certainly, he and his bride, who attended the prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, have all the hallmarks of a power couple in the making. They met eight years ago when she was doing work experience for the then Labour Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.
In 2009, she also did a stint working for her future father-in-law’s charity, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. And dark-haired Suzanne, who has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Trinity College, Oxford, has the sort of exemplary Left-wing credentials to equip her for the high-powered life of a Labour politician’s wife.
She works as an analyst for Social Finance, which helps raise funds from private investors for good causes and is currently working on a pilot programme involving Peterborough Prison. In her spare time, she is a governor at a Westminster primary school.
Suzanne’s parents are, of course, divorced. Her mother is the daughter of a former Turkish government minister and one-time mayor of Ankara.
Family affair: Euan, far right, with his parents and siblings Nicky and Katherine in 2006 during Tony's time as Prime Minister
Her father, Mr Ashman, 64, married Miss Lloyd in 2007 after a whirlwind ten-month romance. The problems over the presence of Miss Lloyd at the ceremony aside, another hitch, it has been reported, is that the young couple — who bought a house together in Islington, North London, last year — have not seen completely eye-to-eye with Tony and Cherie over the arrangements.
Euan, who previously lived in a £1.3 million Grade-II-listed Georgian townhouse bought for him by his parents in Marylebone, London, is said to fear that the wedding could be considered too posh for a potential Labour MP for an economically-ravaged Midlands city, which would damage his chances of getting grassroots party backing.
Accordingly, the menu is said to be a simple affair.
Others invited to today’s nuptials include Euan’s younger brother Nicky and his girlfriend Alex, plus Mrs Blair’s 81-year-old father, former hell-raising actor Tony Booth, and his fourth wife Steph, who unsuccessfully stood as a Labour candidate at the last general election, as well as Cherie’s mother, Gale.
Cherie’s only full sister, Lyndsey, with whom she has had a turbulent relationship, is also expected to be present, as are Cherie’s half-sisters Jenia and Bronwen, from Booth’s former relationship with American sketch-writer Julie Allan.
Not expected to attend, however, is another of Mrs Blair’s six half-sisters, journalist-turned-peace-campaigner Lauren Booth, who publicly criticised Mr Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq and branded Cherie as ‘high and mighty’. Lauren, who appeared in ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! in 2006, converted to Islam in 2010.
With so much to contend with, it is hardly surprising that earlier this week Mrs Blair checked herself, the bride and bridesmaids to the plush Champneys health spa in Tring, Hertfordshire, for a pre-wedding pampering session. I am told that Euan has also booked into the spa, where he has requested a facial.
Cherie, whose love of a freebie is well-known, has also been telling friends that Champneys has offered to supply a team of beauticians, at no charge, to be based in a cottage in the grounds of the Blairs’ estate to touch up the make-up of Cherie and other female guests during the evening.
Given all those pre-wedding headaches, a frazzled Mrs Blair (who is expected to wear a gold and cream lace ensemble) needs all the pampering she can get.
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