The literary projects of political wives have tended to reflect their public personality. Barbara Bush's book - the mock-memoirs of her pet dog, Millie - was jolly and populist, while Hillary Clinton's It Takes A Village was a manifesto for an administration of her own. Norma Major's biographies were thorough but a little dull, while Mary Wilson's poems were warm but with hints of misery.
Cherie Booth's first published work follows this rule. The Goldfish Bowl is smart-looking and intelligent but frequently seems confused about whether the point of the exercise is publicity or privacy.
Mrs Blair is also a lawyer and the first thing you notice is that there is no risk at all of her being done for passing off someone else's work as her own. Co-author Cate Haste (Lady Melvyn Bragg) gets her name in the same-sized type on the cover and the contents are labelled with precision.
The four-page introduction and 18-page conclusion are signed Cherie Booth and written in the first person. This means that it can probably be stated, without too much fear of m'learned friends, that Haste was the dominant figure at the word-processor for the seven central chapters: profiles of Downing Street spouses.
But the book's interest rests on the 22 pages officially attributed to Ms Booth. Fans - and tabloid hacks - will be disappointed because the text always feels more lawyerly than literary: a deliberate exercise in (the charitable view) protecting her family's privacy or (uncharitably) preserving the value of her post-power memoirs.
As personal revelation, the book resembles a striptease in which the dancer shows an ankle and then jumps into a sack. "Very few relationships are entirely harmonious," Ms Booth admits but, just as we're hoping for stories about kettles thrown at Tony, she deflects us with an anecdote about the marriage of the Macmillans.
Next she tells stories about the wives of Eden, Wilson and Major all waking at No 10 to find civil servants in their bedroom. All the rules of narrative demand that the writer next reveals whether this has ever happened to her but a full-stop drops like an injunction. Later, she admits: "I conducted a number of interviews for this book in the middle of a media storm of my own." But, again, there is no follow-through.
The only confessional moments are the poignant revelation that the book was planned as a maternity leave project (a schedule wrecked by her 2002 miscarriage) and the claim that, at the end of No 10 functions, she has to "rush off to cook Tony's dinner."
In fact, she confides that she "tells" people that's what she is going to do, which may not be the same thing at all. Blairism has left us nervous of what words precisely mean and this suspicion is now extended to Boothism by a peculiar addition to the genre of celebrity literature in which the writer tries to give away nothing at all about herself. The intention - ever more important after Lord Bragg's blurted remarks on TV - is to avoid opening up her family to the press. But this tactical invisibility also removes the main reason for opening up the book.
· The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997, Chatto & Windus, £18.99
