Cherie Blair

Angry Cherie snipes at Campbell

Public skirmishes between Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair escalated into a battle this weekend. The former Labour spin doctor has accused the wife of his former employer, Tony Blair, of a series of inaccuracies in her recent autobiography. In a letter to The Times yesterday he alleged that quotes attributed to him in the newspaper's serialisation of Speaking For Myself were not correct.

Cherie Blair retaliated yesterday by attacking Campbell's famous disapproval of her friendship with Carole Caplin, a former topless model. She pointed out that her husband's former right-hand man had misspent his own youth. In a spirited defence of her reliance on Caplin, her close friend and personal trainer during her time in Downing Street, she said: 'People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.'

She was answering questions from an audience of 1,300 book lovers at the Guardian Hay Book Festival in Hay-on-Wye yesterday. 'I did happen to know what Alastair did when he was younger; he wrote very raunchy stories for porn magazines.'

The remark won her applause in an event marked by calls for her to explain her decision to publish the revealing biography. Blair said she had agreed to do it because she was so often misrepresented, but she added that she knew she was guilty of making regular public faux pas. 'That's the story of my life with Tony,' she said: 'He is always saying, "Why did you have to do that?"'

Campbell's letter to The Times suggested that he feels she may have more explaining to do. Complaining of the suggestion that he referred to Andre Suard as 'only a fucking hairdresser', he said: 'There are other direct quotations attributed to me in your recent serialisations of Cherie Blair's book, but this is the one I would like to deny. 'As for Andre, I always liked him and was always grateful when he spared me a time-wasting trip to Blades in St James's (now modernised out of existence) by cutting my hair in Cherie's bathroom in Downing Street.'

Speaking at Hay, Cherie revealed that Tony Blair had not scrutinised her new book as closely as Campbell appears to have done. She said that her husband had 'skipped' through the more confessional sections of her book - the ones that dealt with their home life. 'I don't think he wants to be revealed as quite soppy and romantic.' She staunchly defended his reputation over the decision to go to war, saying he was a 'good man who took the decision that he thought was right at the time'.

He was, she also claimed, still an idealist. 'Am I the only person in the world who thinks my husband is a socialist?' she asked the audience.

Asked by festival interviewer Francine Stock about her evident and enduring concerns about money, Blair admitted that her impoverished childhood was still an influence.

'We are all the creatures of our own backgrounds,' she said, adding that she stil regretted the couple's decision to sell their Islington home when her husband was elected Prime Minister. 'It was not a very sensible economic decision to make in 1997,' she said. Public skirmishes between Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair escalated into a battle this weekend. The former Labour spin doctor has a... more

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