Daily Mail, December 9 2002

Whatever else it may turn out to be, this is emphatically not a private affair. What started out as a question mark over Cherie Blair’s choice of friends, and then became a rather bigger question over her property dealings, has now become a tide of sleaze lapping at the steps of one department of state after another.

Following last week’s belated admission by Mrs Blair that she had indeed used the con-man and convicted fraudster Peter Foster to buy two properties in Bristol, friends sprang to her defence by insisting that these were merely the personal affairs of a private individual.

Mrs Blair herself seemed to believe that how she chose to invest her money was no business of anyone else. The uproar was simply evidence of a political vendetta being mounted against her.

Well, there can’t be many private dealings in which so many government departments are involved. According to lawyers for Mr Foster, who was already facing deportation home to Australia, the Home Office suddenly tried to bundle him out of the country by the end of last week to curb the mounting embarrassment he was causing.

The Department of Trade and Industry is apparently investigating an allegation that Mr Foster has breached a ban on holding company directorships.

The Lord Chancellor’s Department, which appoints the judiciary, now has to grapple with the apparent naivety and poor judgement of Ms Recorder Booth -- not to mention continuing questions about whether she has yet told the whole truth – when considering her supposed ambition to become a High Court judge.

And what kind of private individual deals with public questions about her affairs by using the Prime Minister’s press office? Public and private cannot be separated so easily when your husband just happens to be the Prime Minister.

One of the most astonishing aspects of this whole affair is the way Tony Blair has been presented as hermetically sealed from his wife’s activities. The impression has been created that she alone decided to buy the two Bristol flats, and that she alone stood to benefit. But that is not true.

Mr Blair stands to gain from these investment properties as much as his wife. The £69,000 discount Mr Foster negotiated on the deal – whether or not this was because he brandished the Blair name – benefits them both. So even though the Prime Minister may have left all the negotiations to his other half, he is an equal beneficiary of the deal -- and is therefore tarnished by the way it was done.

For we now learn that it was conducted through a ‘blind’ trust established by the Blairs. Under the terms of this trust -- set up with the proceeds of the sale of their Islington house when they moved to Number 10 – the couple were supposed to have no knowledge of where their money was invested. Yet while the flats may indeed have been purchased in the name of the trust, Mrs Blair was clearly directing the sale, as last week’s emails show.

Downing Street claims that trust rules apply only to stocks and shares and not to property. But the ministerial code of conduct makes no such distinction between investments. In his forward to this code, Mr Blair says the rules should be applied both in the spirit and the letter. Mrs Blair seem to have broken their spirit, at the very least. And unless she kept secret from her husband the fact that they were spending half a million on investment property, he would have broken it as well.

It is an irony that this ‘blind’ trust, which was created to keep the Prime Minister at a proper distance from financial transactions in his name, has now drawn him straight into the affair. For the fact that the trust bought the properties means that the trail of awkward questions from the deal leads straight to him, too.

A fraudster and con-man does nothing out of generosity of spirit. What did Mr Foster want in return for his wheeler-dealing on the Bristol property market? He says he refused to charge Mrs Blair the £4000 fee of the accountant he used during the deal, paying it out of his own pocket. Why? What did he expect to receive in return for this largesse?

Even more startling, the accountant in question, Andrew Axelson, is himself awaiting trial on money-laundering charges. And why was an accountant needed at all for a straightforward property deal?

Mr Foster’s connection to the Blairs arose through his girlfriend, Carole Caplin, Mrs Blair’s guru on fashion and dubious therapies and former trainer for a mind-bending cult condemned in Parliament as ‘profoundly wrong’. Ms Caplin is said to be a regular guest at Chequers. For the Prime Minister to consort with such a person calls his own judgment into question. And if he didn’t know about her shady boyfriend, he should have done.

Mr Foster has boasted that he would recruit Mrs Blair to endorse his plan to supply dubious slimming pills to British schools. No doubt he has grossly inflated his claims of access and influence. But the Prime Minister should never allow himself to be put into a position where such people can make capital out of his proximity.

Our predominant victim culture encourages people to blame others for their own errors or misfortunes. Mrs Blair’s resentment at the fierce questioning she has provoked is a typical example. As the wife of the Prime Minister, she is not a private individual. She wields substantial influence over him, maybe more than anyone else. If her judgment is deeply suspect, it rebounds on him and has an impact on the country.

If Caesar’s wife needed to be above suspicion, why should that not be equally true for the wife of Tony Blair?

Public and private cannot be separated here. So it was perplexing, to say the least, to hear the Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin stubbornly insist last week that the Tories would have nothing to say on the Bristol affair because it was a private matter.

Now, very late in the day, Iain Duncan Smith has finally raised ‘legitimate and genuine concerns’ – but only about the press operation, not the dubious aspects of the deal itself. Whatever the government’s latest outrage – its nihilistic sponsorship of the drug culture, its latest lethal attack on marriage, its loss of control of the country’s borders, and now unsavoury relationships in Downing Street – the Opposition simply pulls the covers over its head.

And because the Tories are so cravenly transfixed by Mr Blair, they allow him mysteriously to float high above all the chaos and venality that characterise his administration. No sleaze sticks to him. He is Downing Street’s very own out-of-body experience. And now he is even attempting to float above his wife.

But if the Tories aren’t prepared to be outraged, the public certainly are. Here is a wealthy Prime Minister and his high-earning wife, with a cool half million to invest on the property market for luxury accommodation for their student offspring, courtesy of con-men and charlatans in their social circle -- while the government prepares to fleece the middle classes through top-up fees.

A private matter? On the contrary. It goes to the heart of our diminished political process and the continuing corrosion of our public life.

Posted by admin at December 9, 2002