What possessed the former Prime Minister's wife to share with us such intimate details of her private life? This was the question asked of Margot Asquith, the first woman to lift the lid on marriage to the politician at Britain's helm. Her autobiography appeared in 1920, four years after her husband Herbert stepped down as Prime Minister. It appalled polite society and, of course, made her lots of money.

Margot Asquith had the refreshing tendency of speaking her mind. But, where she differed from Cherie Blair was in the quality of her repartee. Introduced to the actress Jean Harlow, who proceeded to mispronounce her name, Margot jumped in: “My dear, the ‘t' is silent, as in Harlow.” Nor could she hide her detestation of the man who had successfully intrigued to succeed her husband in Downing Street. As she put it, Lloyd George could never “see a belt without hitting below it”.

Thus it was with great excitement that the publishing world prepared for the launch of her memoirs. The fact that she had omitted to show her husband the text prior to its printing only added to hopes of serious indiscretion.

The newspaper serialisation did her few favours, ensuring a succession of outraged letters from her, bemoaning the “sad profession” of journalism for which “I am constantly approached to write on vulgar subjects for vulgar papers for £200”. But when it came to the reviews, it was the quality press that did most to stick in the stiletto.

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• Cherie Blair: the secrecy and sadness behind a remarkable memoir

Multimedia

• Full coverage: Cherie Blair autobiography

Background

• My complex life in Downing Street

• Secrecy and sadness behind memoir

• Leo: my miracle baby at 45 (and yes, he did have the MMR jab)

• The night I hated Tony

Background

• Miscarriage: ‘I'm afraid the baby's dead, Mrs Blair'

• The Queen and I: relations with the royals

• Cherie Blair's face-off with Campbell over Caplin

• Peter Foster and the ‘scandal' that never was

The Times reviewed the book under the sub-heading “A Revelation of Character, Vanity and Self-love”. “This book is a scandal that cannot be justified or excused,” it claimed with ill-suppressed glee, its metaphorical monocle popping out at Margot's reminiscences of a youth spent as a “flirt” entertaining boys in her bedroom after midnight.

In common with other critics, The Times found particularly distasteful “the way in which she takes the public to the graves of her dead babies and refers to the unforgotten sorrow of their parents in words which we shrink from repeating”. If her claim that she was not writing for the money or the notoriety was true, then “we must assume that she is as insensible to many received standards of conduct as a blind man is to colour”.

So diverting was her tittle-tattle that reviewers forgot to notice her autobiography's lack of political gossip. It was a bestseller nonetheless and two years later she accepted a further £30,000 advance to write a second volume.

The commercial success of both volumes deluded her into believing that she had a future as a playwright. This was stymied when Vita Sackville-West failed to provide her with ideas for a plot. Can it be that Mrs Blair has consciously given the West End the material for Cherie, the Musical?

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