Cherie Booth could always become involved with football - maybe take on the steerage of the England team, in a manager/coach capacity. Short of that, it's difficult to see how she could be less popular, across an amazingly broad spectrum of the nation's chattering, political and, indeed, voting classes. If there's one arena in which she enjoys a reasonable amount of affection, it's among lawyers. And we all know what we think of them.
Recent attacks have centred on her decision to keep the royalties from her forthcoming book, The Goldfish Bowl. It's about prime ministers' wives. I suppose the argument for her giving the money to charity would be that her unique insights into this particular topic are due to her husband's efforts and not her own, but I think that's pretty weak. She still has to write the darn thing.
More probably, her critics are listening to their guts over their minds, and their guts are saying: "Love, you have tons of money! Give some of it away!" Even the most intermittent follower of Cherie's first-lady trajectory will know that this is like asking a tiger to go easy on the stripes. She does not like to give away money, not even in the cash/services exchange that most of us would know as "spending".
My objection to the book comes from the title, by which I intend to judge it, pending a look at the cover. The clear signal is that this is about scrutiny, principally media scrutiny, and how unjust it all is. Sources "close to" Ms Booth talk continually of how wounding she finds it when people attack her for her outfits, her dodgy property deals, or her free holidays.
I wouldn't even defend it on the basis that this is the price you pay for life in the public eye. I would merely say, good Christ, it's the Daily Mail you're talking about most of the time. Your average 18-year-old fresh out of Pop Idol gets more kneejerk flak, more personal intrusion, more judgment for their physical frame and decoration thereof than a prime minister's wife will take in a lifetime. What do they do? They ignore it! Sticks and stones may break their bones, but accusations of cellulite will never hurt them. If The Goldfish Bowl hinges on the iniquities of the press, as I suspect it will, all I can say is, toughen up a little. Take a tip from Jordan. Get over yourself.
But it remains the case that Cherie is like a political piñata for many of us, this figure of gaudy hate that we're all going to hit with as many sticks as we can think of, until she explodes in a plume of sweets and tissue paper. And for the sake of our own souls, rather than hers, we need to decide what constitutes a legitimate target.
The tightness is legitimate - she is legendarily stingy, this woman. Not just the free holidays, the grabby shopping trips, the Downing Street expenses skirmishes. This is a woman who, at the last Labour conference, walked off with a trades union mug she hadn't paid for, on the basis that she "never carries cash". She's an absolute skinflint. And the long-term impact of all this is that we have to suffer entire summers of this family chummying up to Berlusconi, just because they won't cough for their own villa. Clearly, Blair is also to blame, but that doesn't expiate Cherie, nor make the spectacle any less demoralising.
The clothing, the new-age healing, the lipstick-on-the-coverlet portrait - all that, unless it intersects with Peter Foster or some incidental ligging, is irrelevant. I think she probably is quite a vain woman, but it doesn't matter that much. There's often sly criticism for the fact that she works too hard, or doesn't work hard enough, or thinks of herself as a superwoman, without being sufficiently super. That's all so much nonsense: while I recognise that people still exist who resent women for working and having a family at the same time, it baffles me that they're not too embarrassed to say so.
She is occasionally hit by the dust of battened-down snobbery. Mary Ann Sieghart wrote of Booth in the Times yesterday: "In conversation, she is lively company. She speaks quickly and fluently, with just the occasional vowel betraying her Liverpudlian roots." Astonishing, the messages in that sentence - that provincial roots are shaming; that speed and fluency might be impaired by a provincial accent; and, I think, a background hum of "what's a common upstart like that doing in a seat of power in the first place?" You often hear that subtext in attacks on Booth; it really is obnoxious.
So, while I wouldn't for a second advocate a ceasefire in Cherie-sniping, I think, as we approach the publication of her book, when the fun will really start, it's time to sort out fair criticism from extraneous malice. When we give free rein to any piece of unpleasantness that pops into our heads, it's not really a critique of Booth at all. It's a critique of everyone but.
