Perhaps the most formidable achievement of Cherie Blair's role in the affair of two flats is that she has signally failed to win the sympathy of the hackettes. Feminist journalists, who can usually be relied on to see victimhood wherever oestregen gathers in human form, this time have responded to her "I am not superwoman" speech as warmly as they would have done to hearing Hugh Hefner confess - sob - I am not a virgin.
It was that list which did for her. Not merely am I an industrious wife, but I am the Prime Minister's consort too, with government policy to formulate and implement. I am a Queen's Counsel, one of the busiest in London, and I run my own chambers. I am also a part-time judge. I do a great deal of charity work. Last year I won the single-handed round the world yacht race, and this year I've built a space shuttle. I also run British Airways part-time. And, most of all, I am a tireless MOTHER. I confess. I have too many balls in the air. . . Over-reaching yourself at 25 is one thing; doing it in the midst of the menopause a score of years later is quite another - especially, doing the overdoing on such a scale. There can be only one explanation: that fell brain-cell-eating bacterium, e-blairi, which robs its victims of all common sense, all feel for reality, all grasp of proportion.
Most people would agree that being the spouse of the head of state - which is what Tony Blair has effectively become - is sufficient unto itself. Even taking on the extra burden of making sandwiches every day would overtax even the most capable of people.
Feminist "empowerment"
Cherie Blair has done more than make a few sandwiches. She has made a complete fool of herself because she swallowed the feminist "empowerment" message, hook line and sinker - and managed to combine it with good old-fashioned Catholic neurosis and New Age mumbo-jumbo. The result is what we've just seen.
Presidential consorts of either sex should be barely visible helpmeets. As anything other than the husband of the Head of State, is Martin McAleese visible in any way? Does he run a rival career, bridging the gums and reshaping the bicuspids of the mighty, and giving interviews to the press? Nope. Untouched by e-blairi, the lad's invisible; and that's how he should be.
Aside from drinking gin and tonic and attending Rotary lunches, did Denis Thatcher do anything else during his decade at Number 10? Yes he did. He played golf. That's it.
Two careers
You can't have two careers of national standing in the one marriage, especially if there are children in it as well. However, if you absolutely insist on having a second high-profile career within your marriage, don't then dabble in the mumbo-jumbo of New Age therapies. And most of all, leave sex out of it.
But Cherie Blair, thanks to some cell-munching by e-blairi, and thus believing herself immune to the laws of ordinary mortals, did everything she shouldn't have done. She insisted on continuing her highly successful career. She insisted, along with her husband, on being a very public parent. And worse still - oh worst of all - she insisted on dabbling in New Age gobbledegook, under the influence of Carole Caplin.
Here be loony tunes. CC is obsessed with bowels, and movements thereof; and these - her own and her clients' - she often discusses with gusto. So at this point, we should all - especially Tony Blair, and both Cherie Booth and Cherie Blair, and their children - be grateful no disclosures on this subject have yet - what is the word? - emerged.
But actually, what we know is already mortifying enough. Carole Caplin and Cherie Blair had nude showers together, during which the therapist washed "toxins" from her client's body. She also gave the QC certain exercises, to be performed alone in order to intensify her sexual experiences. Yes, they even give lessons in that nowadays.
This is all so sad: that a woman who is so intelligent, and so personally experienced in the ways of the world - for the law can provide a bathyscaphe into the moral abyss - could still know so little about herself and human nature that she could so busily heap such folly upon folly. Where she should have been reticent she has been garrulous, where she should have been cautious, she has been impetuous, and where discreet, as imprudent as sailors on shore leave.
But merely because she is a victim of e-blairi her case cannot be dismissed as generally unimportant. Somebody, sooner or later, had to put the feminist myth of all-things-being-possible to the limit; and with this worm in her brain, she was the test pilot who flew her vehicle of ambition to the zenith of its parabola, where the sky was black, the earth distant and unworldly, and her aircraft simply unflyable.
Back on earth
Somewhere down on the surface of that earth are her children, living lives of real confusion with the uncertainty of most teenagers. Poor Euan must now pass through his first term at university with his mother's various vagaries, including her sessions of sexual release, common knowledge among his peers. The other children, lesser known, must be passing through their own personal valleys of discomfort.
Parents can't make prisons of their lives in order to keep their children in countenance. But there are heights to which they can go from which their children's real needs simply become invisible; and the Tony-Cherie ego-vehicle long since reached that altitude.