The first First Lady of Europe?

While we're on the subject of reminders The Telegraph has a comment piece up on Cherie Blair/Booth, and since we already know her other half is in line for the EU Presidency and since elsewhere in The Tele Dan Hannan (linking to The Times) notes that pressure is being put on Czech President Vaclav Klaus it's a timely reminder of what the first First Lady (or Première Madame?) could be like.

Honestly, has that woman no shame in generating publicity to sell her memoirs? It was bad enough that Cherie Blair revealed to the world that she forgot her "contraceptive equipment" on her annual trip to Balmoral. Poor little Leo Blair will never live that one down. But at the Cheltenham Literature Festival at the weekend she rewrote history again when she declared that it was a 51-49 decision to invade Iraq. Funny that. There was me thinking that her husband had decided with George Bush to go to war with Iraq within days of the World Trade towers atrocity irrespective of what the House of Commons thought. Was it also not the same Mrs Blair who demonstrated her unswerving commitment to the biggest British foreign policy fiasco since Suez by hitting the telephones to persuade wavering women Labour MPs to back her husband in the crucial Commons vote?
...
On an official trip to Australia, she went shopping at a designer clothes showroom. In what might have been a scene from Supermarket Sweep, she left with 68 items worth £2,000 after being told to take "a few things'' as gifts.
She is still the only PM's consort to have had her own taxpayer-funded, part-time press secretary – a tacit admission that she relished courting controversy. It must have felt like a full-time job. There was the tactful decision to sign a copy of the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly at a Labour Party fund-raising event. She then appeared to condone Palestinian suicide bombers only hours after 19 Israelis died in a suicide bomb attack.
Ever the hypocrite, she rightly demanded privacy for her children while she was in Downing Street yet shamelessly exploited them for commercial gain on the international lecture circuit and in those wretched memoirs. Last year, she embarrassed her husband again when she compared him to Sir Winston Churchill.
The truth is that despite his remarkable three election victories and successful conclusion of the Northern Ireland peace process, the disastrous Iraq war will be the enduring legacy of Mr Blair's premiership. In the same Vanity Fair interview last year she admitted that her children had been taunted at school over the Iraq war. She said: "Everybody called their father a liar." I wonder why.

On the plus side, she's not in the same league as Imelda Marcos.