I’ve observed before that there are good reasons to criticise Cherie Blair, but it’s revealing that those aren’t the reasons why most people in the media criticise her. It’s worse than that: they hate her—and for the oldest human reason of all: she’s “not one of us”.
Cherie Booth was a poor north-of-England Catholic girl from broken home who fought her way up to the top with brains and hard work. As Mrs Blair she’s been determined to make shedloads of money and hates talking to the press. Short of having had a brief career in soft porn modelling, married-and-divorced Lord Macca of Loch Kodak, and taken a giant-Toblerone-sized chunk out of his Swiss bank account, it would be hard to imagine biography more likely to make her a target for the Polly Fillers (if not the Glenda Slaggs) of the UK’s national newspapers.
In a week when BBC Radio replaces a Jeremy with a Julian on its flagship current affairs phone-in—I suppose it’s better than replacing a Dimbleby with a Dimbleby—it’s worth reading this at Mick Hartley’s place. Guess what? Cherie is “chippy“.
No ‘they’ just hate her, trying to find reasons for their hatred is as futile as something else that’s really awfully futile. She’s a major celebrity and major celebrities can only be good or bad, no other classifications can be permitted. We, the huddled masses, are fed with stories (rarely facts) about them and many of us are foolish enough to think we know them quite intimately. Certainly well enough to be able them to categorise them far more easily than we can the people we meet every day or even the ones we share our lives with. It may be to do with what Howard Jacobson and others keep banging on about viz. the infantalisation of our society but it may almost as equally well not be. He might be a good, if minor, celebrity but then again he might not be, but he’s nowhere near major enough to have entered the realm of certainty that our Cherie now occupies.
Chippy? Oh, well done her.