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Exodus
from Ulster
They presided
over an empire built on drug money and violence.
Now Ulster has finally had enough, and Johnny
Adair’s gang has come to Scotland. Home Affairs
Editor Neil Mackay reports

How
Scottish Labour could pay the price of Blair's
hard line on Iraq ... and there's nothing they can
do
Elections are
looming for the parliament and the polls spell a
surprise upset. Political Editor Douglas Fraser
finds out if feelings on Iraq are going to cost
Scottish Labour seats

My
name is Scotland. I used to beat myself up but now
I feel better
Holyrood
commentary: Devolution has forced us to take a
long, hard look at our identity. Now, says Iain
Macwhirter, we must face up to modern life and
move on

Powell's
corporate strategy fails to sway opinion in
Baghdad's heart
Eyewitness:
James McGowan in Baghdad

Star
Struck
The crash of
Columbia has dented our plans to colonise space.
Science Correspondent Stephen Naysmith asks if we
are nearing the end of our dream of conquering the
final frontier

The
final means of persuasion...bribes
The
diplomatic battle: George W Bush is carrying a
big stick -- and a large chequebook. Marion
McKeone reports from New York on the pressures
being exerted to win global support for a war on
Iraq

The
final means of persuasion...part II
The
evidence: Colin Powell's dossier on Iraq may
not have revealed much to convince the doubters,
but, argues Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle, the
real exposé was the extent of the US intelligence
operation

How Cherie gained two houses ... but lost the
plot

Health potions made from strawberries grown in
standing stones, protective crystal pendants and mud-smeared rebirth
ceremonies in Mexico. Life was strange enough for Cherie Blair, says
Political Editor Douglas Fraser,
and then she met Peter Foster

Cherie Blair should resign as Prime Minister's
wife, according to an overwhelming majority of tabloid readers
responding to a phone poll. In a news season that has become almost
permanently silly, the story causing such reader frenzy is one from
the 'you couldn't make it up' top drawer.

But the tale of how Cherie Blair (or, interchangeably, Booth) was
being told to perform an impossible resignation, somehow getting
herself embroiled in property speculation with the aid of an
astonishingly persistent fraudster, and possibly a network of other
seriously dodgy geezers, is causing much pain in the prime
ministerial retreat at Chequers this weekend, where Tony and Cherie
Blair are guarding their family privacy as fiercely as ever.

Surveying the press of the past week, they face ridicule for a
chain of friendships that has managed to associate them with a soft
porn model-turned-cult member-turned-lifestyle guru, whose mother
contacts the spirit world on Cherie's behalf, and whose boyfriend
combines an outrageous approach both to fraud and self-publicity.
Without having met Mrs Blair, he bought two flats for her, paying
professional fees on her behalf to another man who, it now turns
out, is facing an Old Bailey prosecution for money laundering.
Somehow, the 80s pin-up girl, Sam Fox, is involved for having been
duped by the same bloke.

Confused? Probably not as much as the Blairs. And that's without
the traumatic factor of two recent miscarriages for Cherie.

To attempt to boil this story down, the one fact, so far
undisputed, to which the bruised Downing Street press machine keeps
returning is that Cherie has done nothing illegal or improper --
not, that is, unless you consider it improper to let the Downing
Street press office lie on her behalf about her links to the
fraudster. Essentially, she was merely doing what high-earning
parents are doing throughout Britain's university towns, jumping on
the property price express as a means of helping pay for the bairns'
education.

Left-wing critics point out that it may not be illegal, but it
says much about the priorities of New Labour, particularly when
Blair has been arguing for students to pay top-up fees to attend
elite English universities. By unhappy coincidence last week, the
Prime Minister beat a rare retreat on the issue in the face of a
hostile party (and, confusingly, the student campaigning of the
Foreign Secretary's son, Will Straw).

Apparently, it wouldn't do to have Euan Blair -- previously best
known for being found incapably drunk in Leicester Square two years
ago, and now a Bristol University student -- staying in mere digs.
And not content with buying one flat for him in the swankiest part
of Bristol, priced at nearly £300,000, Cherie was persuaded that it
would be a smart investment to buy another in the same block, to be
rented out to visiting professors and the like.

It was the man doing the persuading who became the problem. He is
Peter Foster, an Australian who has been scamming since school,
jailed in Britain, Australia and the US, still a wanted man in the
latter two and deemed 'not conducive to the public good' in the UK.

At first, it was dodgy boxing promotions in his native Gold
Coast, Queensland. He sold tickets for a Muhammed Ali fight to which
The Greatest never showed up. But he quickly discovered women -- not
the way young men usually do, but by discovering there is a lot of
money to be made out of exploiting women's weaknesses for quick-fix
dieting, stress-busting cures and herbal remedies, particularly with
a hint of the exotic orient.

On hearing one of the lines he used on Cherie, 'your pleasure is
my purpose', most women could be expected to reach for the sick bag.
But Foster latches on to a different type, perhaps the most needy
kind, maybe like his doting mother, who admits he was an unwanted
child, brought him up on her own, and now takes pride in her son's
notoriety.

From an exchange of emails Foster gave to the Daily Mail last
week -- they continued for six weeks, though she claims it was only
two -- it is clear that his corny line in verbal stress-massaging
worked a treat. 'You're a star,' twittered the top QC, in
recognition of his shameless use of the Blair name and prime
ministerial cachet to drive down the flats' price. The saving he
claimed when the sale went through last month was £70,000 in total,
and he told her that within a couple of years, the value should be
up by £80,000 to £120,000 on what she paid.

Foster's fame began in Britain in the 1980s, when he wooed Fox,
then a 20-year old Page Three stunna. She was fooled into using her
fame to help promote a slimming drink, which turned out to be tea.
Fox reckons it took two years to get her career back on track.

This year, Foster arrived back in Britain, and was immediately
faced with extradition. Allowed to stay here during the appeals
process, this time he wooed Carole Caplin, a one-time soft-porn
model, who was a member of a cult group and whose herbal remedy
company went bust 10 years ago. It was then that she began working
at London's Albany health centre, where she befriended lawyer Cherie
Booth, wife of a rising star in the shadow cabinet.

That friendship has apparently become very important to Cherie,
as her life has moved from family-and-career anonymity to tabloid
demonology. Caplin is the woman who handles Cherie's wardrobe, does
her shopping, packs her bags,acts as personal trainer, soothes
insecurities, goes on occasional holidays and is generally a
reassuring pal through a stressful life. Given that Cherie was too
well known and busy to be able to go flat-hunting in Bristol this
autumn, she asked her chum to do so for her, and Caplin obliged in
the company of her new man. The e-mails soon followed.

The nature of Caplin's friendship with Cherie sends us into the
psychology of trying to understand a woman who is known for being a
fantastically bright and politically feisty, high-earning lawyer,
but whose public image is of being doe-eyed, insecure and clinging
to her hubby with that curious smile signalling raw terror .

Cast your mind back to 2 May 1997, with her in a nightdress,
answering the door for a bouquet of election victory red roses, and
caught in that bleary state by waiting photographers. Cherie and the
camera lens have had an unhappy relationship since then, its
unforgiving invasiveness exposing her to ridicule and malice,
particularly from the Daily Mail, which has used her to pursue its
conservative agenda of running down not only her husband, but any
successful women who juggle work with raising children .

Her background was one likely to fuel insecurity. Her father,
Tony Booth, was a philandering actor who left her mother to bring
her up in very modest circumstances in Liverpool. He now enjoys the
reflected fame to visit left-wing rants on his son-in-law's
government policies.

She has had to be tough and determined to make it where she now
is in her own career, and tougher still to be living above the shop
called Her Majesty's Government. One guiding light is her
Catholicism, which requires her to forgive and believe in second
chances -- even though her job as a part-time judge requires her to
be rather less so. Add to that Cherie's interest in New Age health
and philosophy. It may be tabloid exaggeration, but recent forays
into unorthodox therapy have reportedly seen her at an 86-year old
healer, who grows strawberries in a circle of standing stones, from
which he makes a health potion. He also uses a crystal to dowse for
poisons and blockages in the body, using clients' nail clippings.

There was Bharti Vyas, the auricular therapist who corrects
flagging energy levels with needles in the ear. There is the pendant
in which crystals vibrate to protect from negative forces. There is
the dietician who did wonders, reportedly, with a prescription of
oatcakes. And both Tony and Cherie took part in a rebirthing
ceremony in Mexico, which involved the smearing of mud and papaya,
incantation and some primal screaming .

It could be that she is doing what many women do by looking for
novel ways to cope with life's pressures . Or it could have
something to do with the pressure of power .

She is not the only one to show signs of poor judgement under
pressure. Nancy Reagan stands out as a First Lady of the White House
who abused her power through devotion to astrological advisers.
Princess Diana was known for faddish and outlandish ways to cope
with fame's pressures, sharing with Cherie a belief in the power of
aural acupuncture. The Duchess of York found herself meditating
under pyramids and with a spiritual counsellor.

To return to the essence of last week's story, Cherie stands
accused of being extremely foolish in trusting someone she had never
met to negotiate a large property purchase. 'It was like asking
Michael Jackson to be your baby-sitter,' was the opinion of another
Antipodean.

Her crime was to attempt a cover-up of something that wasn't a
crime. Last Saturday, when the Mail on Sunday first demanded answers
to 22 questions on its scoop, she used the Number 10 press office to
deny knowing him, meeting him, entertaining him or having him as a
financial adviser. His later e-mails found their way into the Mail
and repeated denials of government officials were shown to be false.
Cherie has taken full responsibility for the 'misunderstanding' ,
issuing a detailed statement which isn't quite detailed enough, and
still leaves us wondering how much Tony Blair was involved in this.

Cherie has given her media tormentors an opportunity to open up a
familiar line of attack from the right on a successful political
couple. The tactics being deployed are the same as dogged Bill and
Hillary Clinton while Bill was US President. There are those who
hope the apartment block in Bristol will become the Blair's
Whitewater scandal.

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