The wife of the British prime minister
Tony Blair, with whom she has four children, including
one conceived during his premiership. She is also a successful
barrister in her own right, for which she uses her maiden name of
Cherie Booth. Cherie is often compared to
Hillary Clinton, although with the
caveat that Hillary Clinton would more than likely not be caught dead sharing certain of Cherie's
new age enthusiasms.
A
Lancashire lass, Cherie Blair was born in
1954; her father,
Tony Booth, played Mike in the 1960s sit-com
Till Death Us Do Part. Booth left Cherie and her mother when she was two years old, and his daughter by a subsequent relationship,
Lauren Booth, is a journalist with a column in the weekly
New Statesman and something of a
big mouth.
After graduating first in her year from the
London School of Economics, she met her future husband while they were both training for
the Bar. Both ran for the
1983 general election, but Tony took the safe seat of
Sedgefield, his base to this day, while Cherie pushed her luck attempting to overturn the
true blue stronghold of
Thanet North.
While Tony rose through the
Labour Party ranks, Cherie became a specialist in
employment law. In
1995 she became a
Queen's Counsel, and in
2000 helped to set up
Matrix Chambers, which focuses on human rights and shepherding cases towards the
European Court of Justice. On occasion, her work calls for her to oppose the government or argue against its policy, which must make for interesting conversation around the
breakfast table.
Cherie is not infrequently mocked for her faith in
alternative medicine. She has something of a penchant for
magnetic bracelets, turned up to the
2001 Labour conference sporting an
acupuncture needle in one ear, and once spent £239 on a crystal pendant which was supposed to counter
negativity. (If such claims are to be believed, her husband might be advised to invest in one before he next speaks to
Gordon Brown.)
Cherie was reportedly introduced by her
personal trainer,
Carole Caplin, to a
dowser called
Jack Temple, an
Ayurvedic therapist, and Caplin's own
spiritualist mother
Sylvia. Caplin the younger, a former
topless model, had also been involved during the 1980s with a
therapy cult called
Exegesis.
Unfortunately for Cherie, Caplin also recommended her Australian boyfriend
Peter Foster to Cherie in
2002 so that he could help her buy two flats in
Bristol for her eldest son
Euan, currently at
university there. The money, according to
10 Downing Street, came from the sale of their old
Islington home when they moved into the official residence.
Foster himself is no stranger to dodgy deals, and has convictions for
trading standards fraud in three countries after marketing a series of questionable
slimming aids, therapies of which the somewhat gaunt Cherie is likely to have little need.
Initial allegations, inevitably dubbed
Cheriegate, that Foster had used the Blairs' name to obtain a discount of over £30,000 on the properties became overshadowed by the couple's evasiveness concerning Cherie's relationship with Foster. Had the disgraced
Peter Mandelson still had Tony's ear, he might have counselled them that it's not what you did, it's the
fact that you lied about it.
The tabloid press gratefully weighed into the affair
with all guns blazing, one newspaper even going as far as to suggest that Caplin and Cherie were in the habit of showering together in the nude for the purposes of
washing out the toxins.
After new allegations surfaced that Cherie had attempted to interfere in Foster's appeal against his
deportation from the UK, she went public on
December 10, 2002, saying that she had only engaged him because she was too busy to handle the negotiations herself, and had only misled the press office to protect the privacy of Euan, already well-known to the media after his drunken post-
GCSE celebrations in
Leicester Square.
Seemingly on the verge of tears, Cherie wheeled out an arsenal of
doe-eyed glances to camera and references to her vulnerability which seasoned British scandal-lovers might just have
seen before.