Tony Blair’s continuing suzerainty of Downing Street fills decent people with a mixture of fear, disdain and an almost uncontrollable need to belly-laugh. Watching Blair drum out his hypo-crisies and half-truths, all his bogus compassion and credible pomposity, you wonder where he gets it all.
A newly published book gives us some idea. Apparently, the British prime minister is carefully manipulated in the style and texture of his leadership. The dominant force behind him is, as everyone has long suspected, his inscrutable wife, Cherie. This is evidenced in shocking, often pathetic, detail in a new book called Tony and Cherie: A Special Relationship, researched and written by Fleet Street journalist, Paul Scott.
His book says that Cherie Blair uses ‘white witchcraft” to protect her husband both in everyday life and in times of international and lesser crises. Cherie has engaged supernatural guidance for her husband, mainly by calling in the Whitehall coven for advice.
When Tony was faced with the tough-he-man decision about sending British troops in to Iraq, Cherie helped marshall his thoughts and instincts by taking some of his toenail clippings to a health guru, a retired market gardener, for spectral analysis. The guru ‘dowsed” Tony’s pedal detritus with a pendulum fashioned from an old lentil-pruning fork. Once the bits of toenail were declared free of poisons and blockages, Cherie gave Tony the nod and he immediately jumped up on BBC television and said, although he loved and admired Islam and all who sail in her, he was joining up with George Bush’s War on Terror. This would only take 45 minutes.
When Tony’s poor ankles were swollen from having to leap up every minute or so to defend his policies at the House of Commons dispatch box, Cherie made Tony chew on some magic strawberry leaves and soak his feet in an infusion of blindweed, tartaric essence and hag’s milk.
I wanted to learn more and so I phoned up Downing Street. I got put through to the New Labour spin-witch.
‘The world is fascinated and not a little scared by these revelations,” I began. ‘Amazed that the occult properties of the British Prime Minister’s toenail clippings are taken into account when he’s making world-shaking decisions.”
‘Not only his toenail clippings,” she cackled. ‘Cherie always includes a few strands of his nose hair and some enigmatic rubbings from one of his plantar warts. You can’t be too careful when you’re sending thousands of young British men to certain decapitation in places like Baghdad.”
‘Would that also be why Mr Blair always carries on his person a grey velvet pouch containing a frayed piece of red ribbon and a rolled-up bit of paper?” I asked innocently.
‘That’s got nothing to do with Iraq,” she spat. ‘The fragment of red ribbon is just a token to remind Mr Blair that on Friday evenings he has to take what you and I would think is just his weekly bath, but which Cherie says is actually an ancient Mayan rebirthing ceremony. The rolled-up bit of paper contains a goblin’s pinch of ancient Egyptian tomb-dust as a defence against the Maohibbiqan plasma substance that emanates from Mrs Bush. Cherie says you can’t be too careful when dealing with Moon-Egalitarians born in the year of the hound-dog.”
‘Would that have anything to do with the charm circle Cherie believes should be cast around Tony by hanging a garland of dried cat’s entrails, Mexican condor ventral feathers, pigmented Madagascan lemur spleens above the marital bed?”
‘Typical,” shrieked the spin-witch. ‘I can’t understand why Tony spends so much time sucking up to drunken tabloid bums going as authors. They can’t even get basic facts right. The cat’s entrail garland is actually to frighten off Conservative Party wizard ambitions. It hangs over the doorway to the Cabinet room. All the Cabinet members have to crawl in backwards as they enter and only then stand in a line, clap and stamp their feet in rhythm.”
‘I thought they did that anyway,” I muttered, quickly going on: ‘Is it true that Cherie Blair also insists that before they make new policy decisions regarding Britain’s contributions to the worldwide fight against poverty, the Cabinet all rub their noses in each other’s armpits?”
‘That I can confirm,” she said. ‘But only when there’s a gibbous moon and as a mark of respect to certain Pacific islanders.”
I introduced my next question with some caution. ‘Mr Scott has some lurid speculations on Tony and Cherie Blair’s sex life. Is it true they can only manage the bold thing if there’s a portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging over Cherie’s side of the bed? Scott alleges the sight of Saddam leering down at her sends Tony’s testosterone into geo-stationary orbit.”
‘It is not Saddam. It’s a three-dimensional laser depiction of Dorian Grey done in Tony’s likeness. He had it sent over from the Tate Modern. It’s just like Tony, eternally young.”
‘Is this reliance on spells and witchcraft something we’ll see in the next New Labour election manifesto?”
‘I certainly hope so,” she wheezed. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t linger now. It’s metaphysical top-up time so I’ve got to run Cherie over to her snake-charmer in Camden Town.”