IMAGINE HOW it must feel to be described, in the space of a quiet August, as “grotesquely avaricious”, “astonishingly arrogant”, having “no class”, “horribly cheap”, “awkward, envious and frumpy”, “despicable”, “unseemly and tacky”, and having “zero judgment”. A long-lens photo is snatched of you in a modest swimsuit on your private beach holiday and Mark Bolland (who ought to know better since he used to run the Press Complaints Commission) writes that you look as if you are starring in a remake of Moby Dick.

No wonder Cherie Blair’s new book on Prime Ministers’ wives is to be called The Goldfish Bowl.

Whether or not you like Cherie, you cannot deny that she has had to endure the most astonishing public vilification. No one savaged Norma Major for keeping the royalties from her book on Chequers. Nobody called Denis Thatcher a grabby freeloader when he and Margaret took their holidays every year in a friend’s house. There is something about Cherie that brings journalists’ bile foaming to the surface.

Partly it is because they know that getting at Cherie is such an effective way of getting at her husband. It’s two-for-the-price-of-one. They can tell that Blair feels both responsible and deeply hurt when she is attacked. She, of course, is wounded too. As a Daily Mail insider admits, “If you want to have a go at him, having a go at her is a good way of doing it.”

Cherie also raises their hackles because she has been determined to remain her own person, to continue her career and — occasionally — to speak out on matters that move her. She encapsulates what many newspapers, notably the Daily Mail, hate: she is what they quaintly call a “career woman”, liberal and feminist to boot, who manages, pretty successfully, to combine work, motherhood, charity patronage and the role of prime ministerial consort. The more successful she is, the more determined they are to bring her down.

As a Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Blair has had to surmount rather more obstacles than most of her predecessors. She was the first consort to arrive at No 10 with three school-aged children. While there, she bore another and subsequently endured a miscarriage. Unlike previous occupants of the role, she has continued in her career. She also, unlike them, had a political past of her own and known strong views.

Moreover, she took on the job (if job it is) at a time when the media had started to become much more interested in the families of public figures. That interest was partly stoked by new Labour strategists’ decision — a big mistake with hindsight — to sell Tony Blair as an attractive young man with a young family. The iconic image of the Blairs and children waving from the doorstep of No 10, reproduced on their Christmas card that year, was the first piece of ammo in the belts of their enemies.

One of the many paradoxes about Cherie is her attitude to her children’s privacy. She is incredibly protective of them: the word “tigress” is used by several of her friends in this context. And yet she has been happy most years to put photographs of them on her Christmas cards. (Last year, the Blairs sent these cards only to friends but they still found their way into the papers.) This has given newspaper editors more of an excuse to pry into the Blairs’ family life — which completely enrages her.

For bringing up a successful, happy family is Cherie’s top priority, even if work comes a close second. That might be a surprise to her traditional critics but it is explained by Cherie’s own, rather dysfunctional, upbringing, which instilled in her a determination to put everything right in the next generation.

Although she had a strong and loving mother, Gale, to whom she is still very close, Cherie’s father, Tony Booth, was feckless in the extreme. He had a succession of affairs, was frequently absent, failed to support the family financially and left altogether when Cherie was just 9. By this time, he had fathered two more daughters by another woman.

Gale did an extraordinary job of raising her two girls on her own, working in a fish and chip shop and doing many other jobs to make ends meet. But Cherie’s experience as a child made her search desperately for emotional and financial security later in life.

When she met Tony, she soon sensed that, unlike her father, this man was going to prove dependable and solid. Their marriage is one of the most successful in politics: they treat each other as equals and clearly adore each other still.

Cherie wanted him to compensate in their children’s lives for the neglect she sustained from her father. With their older children, Tony got up in the night to change nappies and, even after Leo was born and he was running the country, his wife expected him to do the same. It was she who persuaded him to take a week’s paternity leave after the birth.