How Cherie gained two houses ... but lost the plot; Health potions

Cherie Blair should resign as Prime Minister's wife, according to an overwhelming majority of tabloid readers responding to a phone poll. In a news season that has become almost permanently silly, the story causing such reader frenzy is one from the "you couldn't make it up" top drawer.

But the tale of how Cherie Blair (or, interchangeably, Booth) was being told to perform an impossible resignation after somehow getting herself embroiled in property speculation with the aid of an astonishingly persistent fraudster, and possibly a network of other dodgy geezers, is causing much pain in the prime ministerial retreat at Chequers this weekend, where Tony and Cherie are guarding their family privacy as fiercely as ever.

Surveying the press of the past week, they face ridicule for a chain of friendships that has managed to associate them with a soft porn model-turned-cult member-turned-lifestyle guru, whose mother contacts the spirit world on Cherie's behalf, and whose boyfriend combines an outrageous approach both to fraud and self-publicity. Without having met Mrs Blair, he bought two flats for her, paying professional fees on her behalf to another man who, it now turns out, is facing an Old Bailey prosecution for money laundering. Somehow, the 80s pin-up girl, Sam Fox, is involved for having been duped by the same bloke.

Confused? Probably not as much as the Blairs. And that's without the traumatic factor of two recent miscarriages for Cherie.

To attempt to boil this story down, the one fact, so far undisputed, to which the bruised Downing Street press machine keeps returning is that Cherie has done nothing illegal or improper - not, that is, unless you consider it improper to let the Downing Street press office lie on her behalf about her links to the fraudster. Essentially, she was merely doing what high-earning parents are doing throughout Britain's university towns, jumping on the property price express as a means of helping pay for the bairns' education.

Left-wing critics point out that it may not be illegal, but it says much about the priorities of New Labour, particularly when Blair has been arguing for students to pay top-up fees to attend elite English universities. By unhappy coincidence last week, the Prime Minister beat a rare retreat on the issue in the face of a hostile party (and, confusingly, the student campaigning of the Foreign Secretary's son, Will Straw).

Apparently, it wouldn't do to have Euan Blair - previously best known for being found incapably drunk in Leicester Square two years ago, and now a Bristol University student - staying in mere digs. And not content with buying one flat for him in the swankiest part of Bristol, priced at nearly (pounds) 300,000, Cherie was persuaded that it would be a smart investment to buy another in the same block, to be rented out to visiting professors and the like.

It was the man doing the persuading who became the problem. He is Peter Foster, an Australian who has been scamming since school, jailed in Britain, Australia and the US, still a wanted man in the latter two and deemed "not conducive to the public good" in the UK.

At first, it was dodgy boxing promotions in his native Gold Coast, Queensland. He sold tickets for a Muhammad Ali fight to which The Greatest never showed up. But he quickly discovered women - not the way young men usually do, but by discovering there is a lot of money to be made out of exploiting women's weaknesses for quick-fix dieting, stress-busting cures and herbal remedies, particularly with a hint of the exotic orient.

On hearing one of the lines he used on Cherie, "your pleasure is my purpose", most women could be expected to reach for the sick bag. But Foster latches on to a different type, perhaps the most needy kind, maybe like his doting mother, who admits he was an unwanted child, brought him up on her own, and now takes pride in her son's notoriety.

From an exchange of e-mails Foster gave to the Daily Mail last week - they continued for six weeks, though she claims it was only two - it is clear that his corny line in verbal stress-massaging worked a treat. "You're a star," twittered the top QC, in recognition of his shameless use of the Blair name and prime ministerial cachet to drive down the flats' price. The saving he claimed when the sale went through last month was (pounds) 70,000 in total, and he told her that within a couple of years, the value should be up by (pounds) 80,000 to (pounds) 120,000 on what she paid.

Foster's fame began in Britain in the 1980s, when he wooed Fox, then a 20-year old Page Three stunna. She was fooled into using her fame to help promote a slimming drink, which turned out to be tea. Fox reckons it took two years to get her career back on track.

This year, Foster arrived back in Britain and was immediately faced with extradition. Allowed to stay here during the appeals process, this time he wooed Carole Caplin, a one-time soft-porn model, who was a member of a cult group and whose herbal remedy company went bust 10 years ago. It was then that she began working at London's Albany health centre, where she befriended lawyer Cherie Booth, wife of a rising star in the shadow cabinet.

That friendship has apparently become very important to Cherie, as her life has moved from family-and-career anonymity to tabloid demonology. Caplin is the woman who handles Cherie's wardrobe, does her shopping, packs her bags, acts as personal trainer, soothes insecurities, goes on occasional holidays and is generally a reassuring pal through a stressful life. Given that Cherie was too well known and busy to be able to go flat-hunting in Bristol this autumn, she asked her chum to do so for her, and Caplin obliged in the company of her new man. The e-mails soon followed.

The nature of Caplin's friendship with Cherie sends us into the psychology of trying to understand a woman who is known for being a fantastically bright and politically feisty, high-earning lawyer, but whose public image is of being doe-eyed, insecure and clinging to her hubby with that curious smile signalling raw terror.

Cast your mind back to 2 May 1997, with Cherie in a nightdress, answering the door for a bouquet of election victory red roses, and caught in that bleary state by waiting photographers. Cherie and the camera lens have had an unhappy relationship since then, its unforgiving invasiveness exposing her to ridicule and malice, particularly from the Daily Mail, which has used her to pursue its conservative agenda of running down not only her husband, but any successful women who juggle work with raising children.

Her background was one likely to fuel insecurity. Her father, Tony Booth, was a philandering actor who left her mother to bring her up in very modest circumstances in Liverpool. He now enjoys the reflected fame to visit left-wing rants on his son-in-law's government policies.

She has had to be tough and determined to make it to her current position in her own career, and tougher still to be living above the shop called Her Majesty's Government. One guiding light is her Catholicism, which requires her to forgive and believe in second chances - even though her job as a part-time judge requires her to be rather less so. Add to that Cherie's interest in New Age health and philosophy. It may be tabloid exaggeration, but recent forays into unorthodox therapy have reportedly seen her at an 86-year old healer, who grows strawberries in a circle of standing stones, from which he makes a health potion. He also uses a crystal to dowse for poisons and blockages in the body, using clients' nail clippings.

There was Bharti Vyas, the auricular therapist who corrects flagging energy levels with needles in the ear. There is the pendant in which crystals vibrate to protect from negative forces. There is the dietician who did wonders, reportedly, with a prescription of oatcakes. And both Tony and Cherie took part in a rebirthing ceremony in Mexico, which involved the smearing of mud and papaya, incantation and some primal screaming.

It could be that she is doing what many women do by looking for novel ways to cope with life's pressures. Or it could have something to do with the pressure of power.

She is not the only one to show signs of poor judgement under pressure. Nancy Reagan stands out as a First Lady of the White House who abused her power through devotion to astrological advisers. Princess Diana was known for faddish and outlandish ways to cope with fame's pressures, sharing with Cherie a belief in the power of aural acupuncture.

To return to the essence of last week's story, Cherie stands accused of being extremely foolish in trusting someone she had never met to negotiate a large property purchase. "It was like asking Michael Jackson to be your baby-sitter," was the opinion of another Antipodean.

Her crime was to attempt a cover-up of something that wasn't a crime. Last Saturday, when the Mail on Sunday first demanded answers to 22 questions on its scoop, she used the Number 10 press office to deny knowing him, meeting him, entertaining him or having him as a financial adviser. His later e-mails found their way into the Mail and repeated denials of government officials were shown to be false. Cherie has taken full responsibility for the "misunderstanding", issuing a detailed statement which isn't quite detailed enough, and still leaves us wondering how much Tony Blair was involved in this.

Cherie has given her media tormentors an opportunity to open up a familiar line of attack from the right on a successful political couple. The tactics being deployed are the same as those that dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton while Bill was US President. There are those who hope the apartment block in Bristol will become the Blair's Whitewater scandal.

Copyright 2002 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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