As a Catholic, I’ve always been fascinated by Cherie Blair, who was born in 1954 and raised in Crosby, a suburb of Liverpool with a long-standing Catholic tradition. Cherie, like me, had an errant father whose absence cast a shadow over the family. And when I sat down to write a play about her, Cherie – My Struggle (at the Edinburgh Festival, August 2-25), I drew on my personal experience to portray her parents’ rocky marriage and the shame felt by her mother when she was abandoned by her husband. The non-judgmental term “single mum” wasn’t in use in the 1950s. The term for Cherie’s family was a “broken home”.