Cherie memoir reveals Leo’s right royal conception

Cherie Blair's "too much information" memoirs, which will be in the bookshops at the end of this week rather than October as had been planned, will cause some raised eyebrows at Buckingham Palace today. Perhaps the most awkward of her many personal revelations is that her son Leo was conceived at Balmoral in 1999.

In the book, Speaking For Myself, serialised in the Times, she tells how she has left her "toilet bag with its range of unmentionables" at home because she had been searched on a previous visit to Balmoral. Without a blush, she writes: "For this reason I had been a little more circumspect, and had not packed my contraceptive equipment out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another… But then, I thought, I can't be [pregnant]. I'm too old, it must be the menopause."

Mrs Blair, now 57, also gives an emotional account of her miscarriage in 2002 in the book, which is expected to earn her in excess of £1.5m from sales and serialisation rights. She expresses her disbelief that her husband and spin-doctor Alastair Campbell released the news within 24 hours of her losing the baby – as I lay in bed in "pain and bleeding". The reason her husband gave was that, to allow her to convalesce, they would have to delay their planned holiday in France and he did not want this to trigger false speculation about an early invasion of Iraq.