With Friends of Friends Like These

Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister, avoids most publicity but has entered that weird zone of modern celebrity where everything she does makes news. And like a character from a reality TV show, she learned last week that tabloid morality tales need both heroes and goats, all the more mesmerizing if they are the same person. At first the newspapers loved her tale of pluck: she grew up in a working-class neighborhood; she and her mother were abandoned by her dad, a famous-old-rogue actor, yet she scored the highest grade in the country on her law exams; she has become an eminent barrister who takes on tough causes while finding time to raise four children, support her husband and do charity work. But now her stardom has entered the humiliation phase, complete with harsh headlines and not a little schadenfreude for the high-flying supermom who isn't as perfect, it turns out, as she seemed.

Last week it emerged that this brilliant lawyer let a convicted con man, Peter Foster, help her buy two apartments in Bristol, one for the Blairs' son Euan to live in while attending university, the other as an investment. That was bad. Even worse was that she gave a seriously incomplete version of events to the press staff at No. 10 Downing St., who passed it on to the media — only to have to apologize when a series of e-mails between her and Foster about the sale was reprinted in the Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid with loathing for both Blairs — which they reciprocate.

How did it come to this? With a little help from her friends. The most exotic is Carole Caplin, 40, whom Blair met 10 years ago at a gym. A former topless model, Caplin became her personal trainer, friend, image consultant and lady-in-waiting: helping buy the stylish clothes demanded of a Prime Minister's wife, traveling with her on vacation, hooking her up with alternative therapists, including Caplin's mother, who uses crystals to channel spiritual energy. Caplin inspected the Bristol properties. But no one reckoned on her new boyfriend, Foster, 39. A charismatic salesman of fake diet aids, he has been convicted of fraud in Australia, the U.S. and Britain and served jail time in Australia, where he resisted extradition to the U.K. with a fanciful tale that his life would be at risk in British prisons because of previous undercover work. With Cherie Blair he was the perfect gentleman. He dickered with the seller's agents, offered to find a mortgage and suggested a property manager. "I cannot thank you enough Peter for taking these negotiations over for me," she wrote him.

But when the Mail on Sunday gave Downing St. two hours to respond to 22 questions implying, among other things, that Blair had tried to evade taxes on the purchase and that Foster's help had secured an unfairly low price, she thought she was being sandbagged by an enemy paper on matters that were legitimately private, and gave answers that were, ahem, economical with the truth. Press aides relayed that Foster "had never been the Blairs' financial adviser" and that "if any negotiations had taken place, they had been carried out by Mrs. Blair and her lawyer." Once the contrary e-mails surfaced, she had to come clean and apologize for "any misunderstanding between the No. 10 press office and the media." She also said she had met Foster just once and that had she known more about his past, she "would have been far more circumspect."

Max Clifford, a publicist who represented three business associates of Foster who tried to sell the story of his ties to Blair to the tabloids, estimates that Foster may have earned $157,000 by making his own deal with the Mail. Foster isn't talking. There are rumblings of more revelations to come, but they are not likely to seriously blot the reputation of either Blair. Cherie has sometimes (like Hillary Rodham Clinton) been accused of being a secret left-wing influence on her husband. But on financial matters — except for once failing to purchase a $15 rail ticket when she was late for an appointment — her reputation is sound, and she appears to have done nothing wrong in purchasing the Bristol properties. The deeper damage is to Tony Blair's drive to ease his government's reputation for manic spinning. Long monthly press conferences and keeping his chief communications adviser, Alastair Campbell, in the background had helped take some of the poison out of the relationship between Downing St. and the press. But having been bamboozled repeatedly last week, the reporters have their claws out once again.