-Caveat Lector- http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,856088,00.html
Focus: The Cherie Blair affair Cherie in the dock After an Australian conman dug his way into the heart of Downing Street, spin scandals returned to haunt the PM - and his wife and friends are under unprecedented scrutiny. Gaby Hinsliff, Antony Barnett and Kamal Ahmed Sunday December 8, 2002 The Observer 'I started life as the daughter of someone, now I am the wife of someone, and I'll probably end up as the mother of someone'. - Cherie Booth, July 1994, shortly after her husband became leader of the Labour Party. As an exercise in protecting a woman's privacy, the last seven days for one Cherie Blair, née Booth, have not been so much a masterclass as an education in how to achieve the exact opposite of what you set out to do. A series of fraught telephone conversations last Saturday afternoon have led to allegations of lying, a Downing Street press operation holed, if not beneath the water line, then very close to it and fresh suggestions that, when it comes to private matters of legitimate public interest, the Blairs' attitude to responsible inquiry has been 'you can go hang'. To the rich mix has been added the rumbling narrative of Cherie and her odd mates and a growing rift between three of the closest people to the Prime Minister - his wife, Alastair Campbell, No 10 Head of Strategic Communi cations, and his partner, Fiona Millar, who works as Cherie's media adviser. Both Campbell and Millar feel they have been dealt with shabbily in the past week, attempting to hold a line to the media based on Cherie's peculiar interpretation of the truth. Why doesn't someone tell Cherie that the company she keeps can reflect badly on the man she is married to? Quite simple, really, according to one close confidante in Blair's inner circle: 'Is anyone seriously suggesting that I, or anyone else, is going to tell the Prime Minister's wife who she can and can't talk to?' No, of course they aren't. To the airport official scanning passports in the early hours of the morning of 1 September, the man at the desk simply appeared to be just another unwanted immigrant. Routine checks on the 40-year-old Australian stepping wearily off the late-night flight from Spain to Luton revealed he had a string of convictions. He was also wanted in Australia over a swindle involving slimming pills. Peter Foster was curtly told he would be placed on a return flight within two days and deported on the grounds that he was 'not conducive to the public good'. Yet within six weeks of such humiliation, this convicted fraudster was on intimate terms with the wife of Britain's Prime Minister, swapping chatty emails over the £525,000 property deal she trusted him to handle for her family. Why is a question answered by reference to Cherie's history. Together with her husband, Cherie has created a private stockade around her - a group of friends and allies who are trusted beyond the confines of what is practical. Whatever their backgrounds may be, if they have shown loyalty, and more importantly, discretion, Cherie gives that loyalty back in spades. Until, as with Rosalind Mark, the former nanny who became embroiled in a row over allegations that she attempted to sell her memoirs to the Mail on Sunday , they transgress and then they are dropped without so much as a backward glance. To many such loyalty touches a chord of sympathy. 'You might say that Cherie's only fault is her generosity - and her loyalty,' says one source. But such loyalty, it has been increasingly revealed, has meant that the Prime Minister's wife keeps the type of company that has long raised eyebrows and led to whispers of exasperation from those around her. Last night Downing Street sources did little to deny reports that Campbell had warned Cherie months ago that her friendship with lifestyle coach Carole Caplin was dangerous for the Prime Minister. Campbell told Cherie that he was concerned that such friendships were difficult to control and could reflect badly on the whole of Downing Street. Millar is said to have had similar feelings. A few months later and Caplin announced to Cherie that she had a new boyfriend with 'a colourful past'. His name was Peter Foster - a conman who earned his notoriety selling 'slimming tea' to gullible housewives. And so, as Foster wormed his way closer to the heart of Downing Street and disaster for Cherie Blair, all Campbell's fears have come to pass. Cherie ignored the warnings. Caplin was part of the stockade. The two met in the early 1990s at the Albany gym where Cherie was trying to keep herself in shape and Caplin was a fitness instructor. Caplin touched on one of Cherie's personal weaknesses, her lack of confidence in the public eye. Caplin convinced Cherie that she could turn, in the words of her biographer Linda McDougall, into 'a PR success'. 'Caplin arrived at Richmond Crescent (then the Blairs' home in Islington, north London) and began influencing just about every aspect of Cherie's life, encouraging Cherie to get an expensive haircut, spend more time in the gym and spend some money on suitable clothes,' McDougall wrote of the relationship. 'People couldn't believe the change in Cherie. Caplin encouraged Cherie's interest in alternative therapies, massages, herbal teas and crystals and Cherie, as she always did with something new, went the whole hog and embarked on her new role with passionate enthusiasm.' When, in 1994, Cherie invited Caplin to Blackpool for the Labour Party Conference to keep her spirits up, Caplin obliged with gusto and a solid friendship was cemented. Caplin has introduced Cherie to alternative practitioners such as the healer Jack Temple, who diagnoses ailments by dangling crystals over the body. Her mother Sylvia, a medium who claims to channel voices from 'the other side', apparently takes queries from Cherie by fax. Caplin drops by Downing Street two or three times a week - notwithstanding once being stopped by security because she was driving Foster's car, with Irish number plates - and regularly holidays with Cherie. But still there is a scintilla of misunderstanding. OK, Cherie may be loyal to her friends, but when asked a straight question about a straight issue - had Foster helped her secure a mortgage? - it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that a highly respected QC could answer with a factual truth. Friends of Cherie say that to understand that, you must also understand the chaos of her life. Juggling a high- powered job, four children and a life in the public eye have not always sat comfortably with Cherie's need to coldly analyse the facts and come to a sober judgement on what a reasonable response should be. The comparison, oft made and never anywhere near to the truth, that Cherie is just another Hillary Clinton, is simply incorrect. 'She is shy, diffident,' Lord Falconer, the Home Office Minister and close friend of the Blairs since their days together at the Bar, once said. 'Hillary Clinton is a zillion miles from Cherie; a hard, well organised, politically motivated lawyer who constantly and effortlessly manages career, political agenda, child and possibly husband.' Far from being a ruthlessly organised superwoman, friends say Cherie is cheerfully chaotic: she muddles through life, often relying on friends rather than professionals, because discretion matters more to her than efficiency. When the Blairs sold their previous house in Islington in 1997, Cherie similarly switched the sale from a local estate agent's to a friend in west London who sold the house privately, lest the news leak. In Cherie's world something that should take a few minutes of quiet contemplation is lost in a flurry of competing diary engagements, the children's tea and the latest human rights case. The Prime Minister, dealing last weekend when the original allegations against Cherie were made with, among other things, Iraq, the forthcoming European Union Conference on enlargement and the fire strike, is similarly afflicted. 'There is this notion that as soon as an allegation comes in from a newspaper the Prime Minister drops everything and asks for a full report on the issue,' said one Number 10 official. 'Well, that is simply not the case. He has a lot on his plate.' Mostly, it works. But when Cherie claims that someone is not her 'financial adviser' when it is later revealed that he was giving her financial advice, the credibility of the public is stretched to breaking point. Now serious questions are being asked about Cherie's judgment. It was a whirlwind romance to say the least. In the spring, Foster first began boasting to friends that he knew an American woman professor who was friendly with a close woman associate of the Blairs. Caplin's closeness to power certainly appealed to Foster. 'Not only is she a babe, but she's close with the Blairs,' he reportedly told friends. Foster was introduced to her by a mutual friend on 8 July, and within days they were an item: he began wooing her with small but expensive trinkets - including a £73 notebook from an exclusive Bond Street stationer. By autumn, Caplin was head over heels in love and pregnant. So when Cherie Blair telephoned from an engagement in Bermuda in October, asking Carole to check out a flat in Bristol she was considering for Euan, her son who was just about to start university in the city, Foster - who had so far avoided deportation by lodging legal appeals - went too. Within days, he was emailing Cherie both in her legal chambers at Matrix and at Downing Street, boasting of securing a discount of £35,000 on one flat and offering to handle the paperwork. She emailed back: 'You are a star.' When the closeness of the relationship between a fraudster, Caplin and Cherie was first revealed last weekend, it raised another weak point in Cherie's make-up - the Mail on Sunday , and more particularly Associated Newspapers, who own the Sunday title and its daily stablemate. The papers and Cherie have been at war ever since the Rosalind Mark fiasco of 1998. When an inquiry comes in, Cherie's first response is to raise her eyebrows in fresh exasperation. One senior Number 10 figure described the MoS as a 'bunch of tossers'. That was the mindset when Godric Smith, the Prime Minister's official spokesman, was first contacted about Foster and Cherie at 12pm on Saturday. Cherie simply refused to engage with the 23 questions that had been faxed through to Danny Pruce, the Number 10 duty press officer who was dealing with the flow of infor mation between the MoS and Downing Street once Smith had got down the initial allegations. She argued that, given that nothing improper had happened, there was no reason to reveal any private details to a paper engaged on a 'fishing expedition'. 'How much detail do you have to go into to deny something that you know to be largely crap?' said one source. 'There is one grain of truth and out of that they want to build a mountain of smear and innuendo.' But Associated had a trick up their sleeve. Foster was fatally indiscreet, showing Cherie's emails to business associates - including at least one director of Renuelle, the company he set up to market his Trimit slimming pills. So, when Downing Street said officially that Foster was not a 'financial adviser', as Campbell had been told, the Mail simply revealed the emails that proved he was. Cherie had to admit that she had misled some of her closest colleagues and, through the media operation, the public. But even then, Cherie's statement last Thursday that she was 'unaware of the details of his past, which has since become public,' was disingenuous: she did, in fact, know from Carole that he had had a shady career of some kind. 'There is a distinction between if you are told someone was trouble in their early life, but is now a reformed character, and knowing the details,' said one source close to her. Such distinctions, clear to those with a legal brain about what is strictly the truth and what isn't, are lost on the public. Still, why should Cherie trust him? The clue is Cherie's email admission that it would be a 'weight off (her) mind' if he found her a tenant for the second flat she bought alongside Euan's new home. Any help would be gratefully received. As they look over the detritus of the last week, Campbell and Millar must exude sighs of irritation and exasperation. Campbell says he has worked hard to try and repair some of the broken fences with the media, holding far more open news conferences with the Prime Minister, all on the record. Now the allegations of spin and manipulation are back - along with a cast of characters that would make Campbell's hair go grey. Max Clifford, PR guru, is representing Foster. Ian Monk, former senior tabloid executive, is representing Caplin. Enemies of Foster, and there are many, are selling their stories left, right and centre. And in the middle is Cherie, sometimes out of her depth and now struggling to repair her reputation. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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