OK. It’s clear that Cherie Blair has behaved foolishly in getting tangled with a conman, and then compounded this by making civil servants lie to the press. She will pay for it all sooner or later, and she should already have paid for her lack of judgment by losing any chance of promotion to become a more important judge.
But it is still a mystery why the Daily Mail hates her so much for believing exactly the sort of New Age crap it tirelessly peddles to its readers.
In fact, though, it’s exactly the similarity of her beliefs to what the Mail prints which makes her so despicable in its eyes. As my thrice-divorced, alcoholic friend Torode said to me when he went to become a leader-writer on the Mail, it’s all right when we do it: rich, energetic, and intelligent bohemians are one thing. We can afford to abandon our families because there’s a presumption that they’ll be all right. But this behaviour mustn’t be encouraged among civilians.
The outrage at Cherie’s New Age pendants, or her holisitc beauty treatments, comes precisely because these are what the Daily Mail peddles to its readers. It’s the sort of disgust a drugs baron would feel if his son started using heroin. For the people who run the Mail, believing anything in the Femail section is proof positive that you shouldn’t be trusted with any kind of power or influence in the country