A THEATRE critic may not be the best person to judge the authenticity of Cherie Blair’s public performance. I can’t count the number of actresses who have successfully convinced me that pretence is passion and fiction is fact. Maybe I would have seen through Nixon when he brought Checkers on telly to wag his way out of trouble. Or maybe the critic in me, overimpressed by fake tear-jerking, would have felt impelled to leap through the screen and pat both dog and vice-president on their lovable little heads.

So don’t altogether trust me when I say that, yes, I was moved when Cherie began to crack as she spoke of protecting Euan in his first term at the university which my younger son also attended. I identified with her pain. Judi Dench or Vanessa Redgrave couldn’t have done better. Yet perhaps that’s the point. Cherie Blair is a trained barrister and presumably used to making subtle appeals to the emotions as well as hard ones to the mind.

That’s why I had to acknowledge a growing uneasiness. Were some of those balls that Cherie said she had to juggle, well, balls? Was I being put off the scent by a skilled lawyer? Why had she checked the court lists to discover the judge dealing with Foster’s appeal against deportation? How could she not have known that he was seriously bad news? Such questions began to surface in me as I remembered that I had believed Bill Clinton when he robustly denied that he had had sexual relations with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky”.

So maybe I should leave real life alone and return to the convincing illusions of the theatre, where I belong.

Richard Morrison

OH dear. Imagine the reaction if a highly paid male barrister and part-time judge tried to explain why he had become embroiled with a sleazy Aussie conman by saying: “Sorry I messed up, but sometimes the pressure of trying to be a good daddy gets too much, and I feel that I would like to crawl away and hide.” He would be laughed out of his own court.

Playing the “high-powered legal eagle trying to be a good mother” card has an awful smack of desperation about it, and it doesn’t wash anyway. After all, this affair seems to reveal that Cherie spent as much time worrying about Carole Caplin’s feelings, Peter Foster’s deportation and her own potential profit from property speculation as she did about Euan’s accommodation. Did Cherie really imagine she was doing her son a favour at Bristol University by sticking him in a hoity-toity penthouse? And to excuse her private life from scrutiny on the grounds that she is “only a wife, not a politician” is disingenuous piffle. Like hundreds of other people, I have attended one of those 10 Downing Street seminars organised and hosted by Cherie, and blatantly devised to influence movers and shakers. If she is using No 10 to further her private interests, her private interests are a public matter.

Caitlin Moran

I DON’T think anyone could accuse Cherie of faking being tired, unhappy and so pressurised that her hair, so good from the front, looked one-dimensional when she turned to the side. While Tony Blair looks like he cries ticker-tape print-outs from Reuters, Cherie’s wobbly face looked like the genuine Wobbly Mum face that all mums have when they think about their children going to live in Bristol.

Of course, whether it’s genuine Wobble or not isn’t the issue. What I suspect will be is whether we, as a nation of stressed working mothers, should have any more sympathy for Cherie Blair than any other mum who doesn’t get chauffeur-driven cars and free Tuscan holidays. The big difference there is that when I, for instance, bought that suspiciously cheap Dorothy Perkins top from the car boot on Holloway Road, however bad any repercussions might have been, they wouldn’t have potentially resulted in my husband losing his job and, by implication, the whole country being changed overnight. As it turned out, the only repercussion was in the introduction of one very determined clothes-moth to my wardrobe who ate my cashmere jumper. At no point in the proceedings was there any risk of 600 pictures of me with the four corners of my mouth all pointing in different directions appearing on the front page of all the papers with the invisible headline “HA HA! LOOK AT CHERIE’S WONKY MOUTH!” above them.

Libby Purves

THEY want the press to feel like the nasty fat boy in the playground who gets his kicks by making girls cry. Up to a point, we deserve it. We’re not nice. But why was Cherie sent out there alone? When a man has to make an embarrassing statement to cameras, there’s generally a supportive wife alongside.

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