Cherie Booth, the high-profile wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was at the centre of a new controversy on Wednesday over a lucrative speaking tour of Australia in February.
It is not the first time Booth — who uses her maiden name in her professional life as a top lawyer and on personal engagements — has raised a few eyebrows.
From accusations of ”cashing in” on her privileged status to more personal digs about her dress sense and even her singing talents, the prime minister’s wife sometimes attracts almost as much attention from the media as her husband.
In the latest furore, newspapers reported on Wednesday that Booth received a £17 000 ($30 300) fee to speak at a Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia gala dinner in Melbourne, while the charity only received Aus$16 000 Australian dollars ($12 000).
Under Victoria state law, charities must receive 60% of funds raised in an appeal. Some newspapers said the charity may have to close as a result.
Booth, who is a renowned civil rights lawyer, also came under fire at the weekend when a newspaper revealed she was the first British prime minister’s spouse to receive a government car and driver, including for shopping trips.
With a list of friends including United States senator and former first lady Hilary Clinton, Booth is a partner at Matrix Chambers, a London law firm where fellow attorneys challenged the legality of the US and British invasion of Iraq.
She is also a full-time mother to her and the prime minister’s four children, aged between 21 and five.
Born 51 years ago in northwest England to former soap opera actor Tony Booth and his wife, Cherie put aside her own ambitions to become a Labour politician when her husband began his swift rise to power.
Since he became prime minister in 1997 she has been constantly at his side, and is known as one of his closest confidantes.
Her high profile, however, has also opened her up to attack by the media.
Booth was caught up in controversy in 2002 when it emerged that she had bought two apartments with the help of Peter Foster, a convicted and thrice-jailed Australian conman who was dating her friend and ”style guru” Carole Caplin.
The affair — dubbed ”Cheriegate” — resurfaced last year when Downing Street was forced to deny any conflict of interest when the Blairs rented the two apartments to staff of the French defence group Thales, which has signed contracts with the British army.
Sometimes it is not what Booth does or looks like but what she says that makes headlines.
In 2002, the Israeli embassy in London cried foul when she said young Palestinians ”feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up”.
The comments, at a Palestinian medical charity event, were made hours after a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem that killed 20 people. Booth apologised.
More recently, eyebrows were raised when the Daily Mail — a socially conservative newspaper, which regularly rails against the Blairs as well as working mothers — reported that a police motorcyclist rushed Mrs Blair’s passport to London’s Heathrow airport last month after she forgot it at home.
And in June, she was again accused of taking advantage of her husband’s position by earning a reported £30 000 by giving a talk in Washington on life inside Downing Street. – AFP
