CAROLE CAPLIN, the lifestyle guru who has been frozen out of No 10, has quietly shored up her influence by employing the sister of Cherie Booth.

Caplin has appointed Lyndsey, Booth’s only full sister, as a homeopath for her health and fitness company, LifeSmart.

The links Caplin has forged with a second Booth family member may put her beyond the reach of No 10 officials seeking to cut her adrift. “The officials might be able to stop her visiting Downing Street, but Carole has made damn sure she is never going to go away,” said a close associate.

Family friends of the Blairs said some of Caplin’s theories on alternative health were now passed on to Booth with her sister’s endorsement.

Lyndsey Booth, 47, who gave up a successful career as a lawyer to retrain as a homeopath, helped organise a Downing Street meeting, held two years ago, that aired fears about possible links between the MMR vaccine and autism.

This weekend the truce established between Caplin and the Blairs, with her public declaration that she would not betray their secrets, came under renewed pressure.

Caplin’s former boyfriend, the Australian conman Peter Foster, is threatening to revive the “Cheriegate” flats scandal. Foster, who last year helped Booth buy two flats in Bristol at a discount, has said he intends to publish a photograph of himself with Tony Blair, contradicting No 10’s insistence that the two never met.

The Australian press have billed his memoirs as a “literary weapon of mass destruction”. He has told friends that extracts from the book will be published in Britain ahead of the Labour party conference.

If any picture were proved to be authentic, it would raise serious questions about the frankness of No 10 as it sought to distance Blair from the scandal last December. A spokesman declined to add anything to Downing Street’s original statement.

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