Tony’s walks on the wild side were limited to picking up an old electric guitar, a throwback to his days with a student band (called, presciently, Ugly Rumors). His wife Cherie Booth was a high-flying barrister who earned more than $500,000 a year from her law practice. About her, the newspapers could find nothing to sink their talons into, except for vaguely New Age sensibilities, a sometimes-puzzling fashion sense, and an 8-shaped smile that cartoonists loved.
There is no “first lady” tradition in Britain. (It already has a Queen, after all.) Spouses at No. 10 should be seen and not heard. (Does anybody remember Denis Thatcher?) All that anonymity was fine with Cherie. With her busy career and four children to look after, she was content to stay out of the public glare.
Then along came a real estate deal and two characters straight out of Fleet Street central casting: Carole Caplin, a former topless model who became Cherie’s confidante and fitness-cum-clothing consultant (her “lifestyle guru,” in the patois of the tabloids), and Caplin’s boyfriend Peter Foster, an Australian smoothie with a criminal record for promoting fraudulent weight loss schemes. By last week, not only was Cherie Blair on the defensive, but the unfolding affair also had become a huge distraction for the Blair government, which among other things was getting ready to go to war against Saddam Hussein.
The guru, the conman and the PM’s wife came together last summer when Cherie decided to buy an apartment for her oldest son, Euan, who was going off to university. Busy with work, she enlisted Caplin and Foster’s help in buying two apartments, one for Euan and another as an investment. Caplin looked the places over. Foster helped to negotiate a discount.
Tipped to Foster’s role, the press dug up his past and started asking questions. Through her husband’s press office, Cherie at first denied Foster’s involvement. Then a newspaper published a series of e-mails between her and Foster (“You are a star,” she wrote to him). The press office was then forced to eat its words–and Cherie’s carefully protected public persona began to fall apart.
Like many political scandals, this one lacks a killer fact establishing that Cherie Blair did anything illegal or even unethical. Cherie, for example, plausibly denied that she was aware of Foster’s shady past. But the drip, drip, drip of embarrassing factlets and bothersome innuendo could not be allowed to go on any longer. So Cherie did “a Hillary,” as the British press put it, and went on TV to say sorry. Near tears at times, she insisted that the attacks on her were “frenzied and inaccurate.” But, she said, “I also know I am not Superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I’m juggling a lot of balls in the air, and sometimes some of the balls get dropped.”
As embarrassing as it is, “Cheriegate” is unlikely to grow into a full-blown political crisis for the Blair government. Twice since 1997, Blair’s Labour Party has massively defeated the once-impregnable Conservatives at the polls. Blair has an immense majority in the House of Commons and complete control over his Cabinet in way that even Margaret Thatcher didn’t. Today’s Conservative Party is in a coma–disabled by an ineffective leadership and endless infighting. The only real opposition since 1997 has come from the aggressive British press, especially the right-wing Associated Newspapers titles that–no coincidence–broke Cheriegate.
Because of this, the Blair government, so confident in other spheres, is palpably insecure about the press. “They feel absolutely haunted by the media,” says Roy Greenslade, a former newspaper editor and media critic who is the author of the forthcoming “Press Gang,” a history of British newspapers since World War II. Like her husband, Cherie makes no bones about the way she feels in private. Discussing the role of the media, a friend once said to her, “Fame has its price.” An intensely private person, she would have none of this. “No, it doesn’t,” she said sternly. Now perhaps, she knows differently. “Sometimes I feel I would like to crawl away and hide,” she said on TV last week, “but I will not.” Especially as she’s learned now that sometimes there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
