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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday December 8 2002 14.57 GMT
As is typical, the Conservatives have been muted bystanders in this wounding episode for the Blairs. The battle has been between Number 10 and the opposition it holds to be the real and most threatening enemy: the newspapers. And they will hate, absolutely loathe, being hurt at their hands.
The more violent frothers in the right-wing tabloids have seized on this saga to suggest that the Blairs have somehow turned Britain into a banana republic in which Cherie is a cross between Eva Peron and Imelda Marcos. That is nonsense. There is nothing in the tale of Cherie, the crook and the Bristol property deals that makes wicked people of the Blairs.
In one of his now notorious emails, Peter Foster, the Australian fraudster who helped Cherie with the negotiations, writes: 'The Blairs are good people who believe in the Christian ethic that everyone deserves a second chance - or, in my case, a third or fourth.' That is a handsome character reference. Or it would be were it not written by a convicted conman.
There is nothing disreputable about the Blairs wanting to buy a flat - or even two - in the city where their oldest child is attending university. There are plenty of other busy, high-achieving couples who would use a middleman to try to negotiate the best deal. No one is claiming that Mrs Blair has done anything illegal or even faintly improper. It does not appear that she received preferential treatment because of her name. It rather looks as though she got a worse deal than some other purchasers. Entrusting sensitive family financial affairs to a con man does not speak highly of Cherie's ability to measure people, nor is it a great tribute to her financial acumen.
It is the questions raised about their judgment that are the first thing which makes this tale damaging to the Prime Minister and his wife. The most obvious blunder was to make the story 10 times larger than it need have been by not telling the whole truth from the outset.
Alastair Campbell must be one person who feels badly let down by his boss and Mrs Blair. Just when Mr Campbell thought he was having some success with his operation to kill spin as a story about this government, just when spin had largely been driven from the headlines, the media are again screaming about attempts by Downing Street to manipulate and mislead.
Number 10's official spokesmen are blameless for initially denying that Mrs Blair had any connection with Mr Foster. They were working to a script provided by Cherie and Mr Blair himself. As one Downing Street official put it to me: 'When the Prime Minister and his wife are saying that this is the case - what can you do?' At least it is to Mrs Blair's credit that she has taken the blame on herself rather than, as some in her position would try to do, scapegoat an underling.
She has always been a fierce guardian of the boundaries of the family's privacy. An injunction was wielded to prevent a nanny spilling the beans on the home life of the Blairs, even though the revelations didn't amount to anything more than Peter Mandelson's penchant for pink champagne and Tony Blair's desire for deep bronze suntans.
The Government was mired in a lot of unnecessary grief over the MMR jab because of the Blairs' reluctance to be candid about what they had decided for Leo. The Prime Minister came privately to regret that they were not more open about that.
What he doesn't seem to have absorbed is the lesson of that episode and others. It is legitimate for the media to take an interest in the membership of the Blairs' circle of friends. And even if it weren't, the media are going to be interested anyway. It is, per se, very bad news for the Prime Minister and his wife to entangle themselves in a story with a cast list which includes a diet-pill scamster, a former topless model turned lifestyle guru whose mother claims to be a psychic, and Max Clifford, retailer of sleaze to the tabloids.
Mrs Blair was introduced to Peter Foster by her friend and his girlfriend, Carole Caplin. That relationship with Carole Caplin has long been a source of angst and argument within the Downing Street family. But Mrs Blair has a pronounced - and rather admirable - streak of Liverpudlian bloody-mindedness. She doesn't see why her husband's aides - or even husband - should dictate her choice of intimates. One very close friend of the Blairs reports that there have been some vivid rows about Cherie's attachment to Ms Caplin: 'And you can imagine which letters most of the words begin with.'
The Blairs will be kicking themselves that this has allowed the media to revisit all the tales (true and not) about Cherie's interest in alternative thera pies. This friend points to the huge stress of being Cherie Blair/Booth as she tries to juggle so many, sometimes conflicting, roles - first lady, QC and judge, human rights campaigner, mother of four - all at once and under unforgiving media scrutiny. 'Everyone deals with the stress in different ways. I guess the weird, new agey stuff is Cherie's way of dealing with it.'
The trouble for the Blairs is the dissonance with the projection of them as a normal, wholesome, middle-class family who just happen to be living at Number 10, an image that has been hugely useful to the Prime Minister. The satirists had a wonderful time ridiculing Ronald Reagan when it emerged that Nancy consulted an astrologist before telling the President when he could go out of the White House. The cartoonists had yards of fun when it was revealed that a health guru was giving electrically charged baths to Margaret Thatcher.
The money dimension is also damaging. From what we know of their property transactions, it seems to me that the Blairs are not so much avaricious, rather they are a bit clueless when it comes to cash. They have bought two expensive flats in Bristol at what will very likely prove to be the peak of the bubble in property prices. They sold their house in Islington five years ago just before the property boom took off.
Cherie deeply resents what that cost them in lost profit- and she blames Mr Campbell. It was he who argued that they should sell the Islington house when they moved into Number 10. He did so on the very understandable grounds that renting out the house risked exposing them to embarrassment. Remember how a Miss Whiplash was discovered to be the tenant of a basement belonging to Norman Lamont?
The Blairs do not think of themselves as wealthy. Compared with many of those with whom they mix in the stratosphere of the establishment, they are not wealthy. Compared with most people, including most Labour supporters and members, they are very wealthy. To hard-working folk in Barnsley, so goes the tea-room chunter among Labour MPs, spending half-a-million quid on two flats via a con man makes the Prime Minister and his wife look like they have more money than sense.
This may be unfair, but whoever said politics was fair? The Blairs emerge from this episode looking secretive, rather foolish and obsessed with money. Not what the image-makers would ever order. And especially not when the Prime Minister is telling firefighters that they can't have 30 grand a year and warning students that they will have to pay more to go to university.
When they already have an abundance of enemies, the Blairs need to be especially careful about who they choose as their friends.
Best of Andrew Rawnsley www.observer.co.uk/politics
