"THE trail-blazing first lady of Downing Street", as her promoters like to characterise her, was reportedly paid around £30,000 ($55,000) this week to share her thoughts with a Washington audience. Cherie Blair returned home to a media outcry and accusations that she was exploiting her public role for private profit. If prime ministers' wives could quit, Mrs Blair would have faced calls for her resignation. Officially, Mrs Blair has done nothing wrong. That is because, officially, she does not have much of a job at all. She is not a state employee, which means her job is not covered by the various codes that bind political figures. But that's what has annoyed Britons. Although she has no official role, and so is not bound by the official rules, it seems unlikely that rich Americans would have paid to hear from her were she not Tony Blair's wife.
For a human-rights lawyer with four children and no dark stains on her character, Mrs Blair is remarkably unpopular. She recently topped a BBC radio poll of people who Britons most wanted ejected from their country, beating Abu Hamza, a fundamentalist Muslim cleric with a winning combination of dead eye and hook, by a good length. Mrs Blair's problem is not just that she is the wife of a prime minister loathed by many Britons, but also that her judgment has proved to be dodgy in the past. In 1998, she was spotted wearing a new-age "bio-electric" pendant, said to contain magical crystals. A reputation for credulity was confirmed by news that she employed a "lifestyle guru" to advise on spiritual matters. The guru's ex-husband, an Australian swindler, claimed to have helped Mrs Blair purchase two flats at a discounted price. Having first denied any wrongdoing, she made a tearful public apology.
The Conservatives have called for rules covering ministers' conduct to be extended to spouses. But regulations seem an unnecessarily heavy-handed response to a rather small problem when any sensible prime ministerial consort would take care not to behave in a way that turned the electorate against their spouse. Perhaps painful experience will at last have taught Mrs Blair what the famously low-profile Denis Thatcher told the Duchess of York: "Whales get killed only when they spout."