The better half

She is articulate, intelligent and professional. He was a gin-soaked old reactionary. So why will Cherie never measure up to Sir Denis?

Poor Cherie Blair! She has been telling a weepingly sympathetic audience at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC how unfair it is that she should be criticised for having money-making "outside interests." Previous members of the Downing Street Wives Club hadn't been given as rough a ride as she, because they represented generations when fewer women had jobs.

Poor Cherie Blair! She has been telling a weepingly sympathetic audience at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC how unfair it is that she should be criticised for having money-making "outside interests." Previous members of the Downing Street Wives Club hadn't been given as rough a ride as she, because they represented generations when fewer women had jobs.

"It's a terrible sort of tightrope one is walking all the time," she complained, "professional life and the life of the Prime Minister." There was one person, though, whose precedent she could be seen to be following - "Denis Thatcher also had a number of outside interests," she told the 2,500-strong audience, "Nobody found anything wrong with that."

The comparison is interesting, if a little unfair. Denis Thatcher was indeed a successful businessman for years - director of Burmah Oil and Quinton Hazell, chairman of Atlas Preservative, vice-chairman of Attwoods and consultant to a number of companies - but was 64 when his wife came to power in 1979. When he retired, he was not in a position to use his wife's considerable clout to forge business deals - by contrast, of course, with their son, Mark, who used his mother's international leverage to dazzle the oil-drenched princelings of the Gulf States in the early 1980s. Nor did Denis venture on lucrative speaking tours of the US at a rumoured £20,000 an evening. Nor did he ever publish a coffee-table book about the lifestyles of prime-ministerial spouses down the centuries, and embark on a publicity tour, discussing it on all available media formats.

Denis Thatcher was old enough to have been a major in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War; he was a Lewisham-born stalwart of the English mercantile middle-class, and his attitude to celebrity spouse-dom was old-fashioned and hostile. In his often-expressed view, the role of the prime-ministerial consort was to be "Always present, never there." He often appeared to be not quite all there. He kept out of the limelight, he stayed in the background, he lurked supportively, he chatted inconsequentially without ever quite landing on a subject that might inspire, like the Duke of Edinburgh, an indiscreet opinion. "Better keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool," he used to say, "than open it and remove all doubt." His function was to provide silent public support and private moral validation, and know when to interrupt her, in mid-flow at 2am, with the words "Come on Margaret, time for Bedfordshire."

Cherie Blair sees her role rather differently. Conspicuously clever, alert and vocal where Denis was dim, diffident and quiet, Cherie famously earns more than her husband and possesses a full set of political opinions of her own. She even ran for Parliament, though unsuccessfully, in 1980. And she has constructed a new model of PM's Spouse that makes the old blueprint comprehensively redundant. Her relations with the Press, for instance, are unguarded to an unprecedented degree. Look at the cover of The Insider: The Private Diaries of Piers Morgan, and you'll find Mrs Blair apparently flirting with the rapscallionly former editor. It seemed a tad inappropriate for the nation's first lady to be fingering such an egregiously tabloid-minded (and therefore unreliable) media personality - like finding the Queen adjusting David Yelland's tie at a gala evening

The same goes for the ill-fated interview the Blairs gave the Sun on the eve of the election - a wholly insipid event, staged apparently for the photo-shoot and the Blairs' saucy badinage with the photographer about Tony being a "five-times-a-night" man and Cherie whooping like Jenny Eclair about the size of her husband's colossal majority. It was beyond excruciating. As grotesque mistakes go, it was right up there with the Ford Edsel and the guy from Dexy's Midnight Runners singing in a suspender belt. You could practically hear the Prime Minister cringing with mortification, right there in his garden.

But what about Cherie? Her detractors suspected that, to her, it had seemed like a terrific, new-style-first-lady wheeze.

Perhaps such suspicions stem from a wider mistrust of successful, independent-minded career women. Yet if one tries to imagine how Denis would have reacted in the same circumstances, if asked by a tabloid hack and a veteran snapper to comment on the voluptuousness or otherwise of his wife, and the frequency and/or urgency of their love-making. Heaven knows what the Sun political staff might have asked him (had it been allowable at the time) about his wife's habit of taking a bath with low charges of electricity pricking the water.

It was a different world in the 1980s, when the presentational shenanigans, the news-management and policy marketing were still in their infancy. When contemplating the conduct of the first lady, it is salutary to think what Denis would have made of it. How he would have greeted the advice of spin doctors about his drinking, his public appearances, his obsession with golf ("It's soooo uncool, Den - do you think you might get into snow-blading instead?"). How he might have greeted the advice of a style guru like Carole Caplin. One thinks of the number of pet names he had for gin-and-tonics, taken at different times of day - openers, brighteners, lifters, tinctures, snifters, snorts, snorters, and the snorterino - and how benignly everyone looked upon his Homeric consumption of alcohol. Nobody seemed to mind in the least that the husband of the nation's leading legislator drank like WC Fields. But goodness how they minded the sight of Cherie Blair having her make-up applied (like some guilty, narcotic ritual) by her strange, new-age pal.

Because when it comes down to it, the main difference between Denis and Cherie is very simple and very unfair: the general public liked him, or their idea of him, and they don't like her, or their perception of who she is.

Denis was twice married, befuddled, socially maladroit, rabidly right-wing and thought all BBC employees were Trotskyites and all journalists reptiles. People liked him in spite of it all, because he seemed a real person, supportive, patriotic and true even if also awkward and hen-pecked. Cherie is brilliant, cultured, fast on her feet, politically astute and can hold her own with that other ambitious political lawyer, Hillary Clinton.

A working-class girl from Bury, Lancashire, she worked her way to the LSE and came top in her bar exams. She easily impresses European judges and world statesmen. And yet many British people just don't like her: in a BBC poll of famous names whom Radio 4 listeners would like to see evicted from these shores, she came top, some way ahead of Abu Hamza and Jeffrey Archer. Every newspaper in Wapping, Kensington and Canary Wharf has taken disobliging photographs of her unfortunate smile. People dislike her Catholicism, her dubious friends (such as the Australian conman Peter Foster), her occasional forays into money-making schemes (like the Bristol flats,), her allegedly excessive enjoyment of "freebie" holidays and clothes, her curious devotion to saris - and most of all her alleged exploitation of her position for hard cash. This week, when Mr Blair is in Washington for pre-summit Africa talks with President Bush, Mrs B is scheduled to talk at an event for which she was originally billed as "First Lady of Downing Street".

Cherie Blair is right to say that Denis Thatcher has "outside interests" and was never blamed for them. But his outside interests were gin, golf and the slightly bleary after-life of the business community. One of his last jobs was to attempt to sell grass lawns to the good folk of Saudi Arabia. That kind of quirky British hopelessness was what endeared Denis Thatcher to the British, in a way his wife probably never understood. Cherie Blair would like to pull off the trick of being admired for her cleverness and liked for her character. She appears not to be able to see that, the more she works the system, squares the press, handles the media and proclaims her views abroad, the more she departs from the paradigm of PM's Consort. Instead of being a dutiful First Lady, she is in danger of becoming the Last Straw.

Cherie Blair

* Background: Born in 1954, Bury, Lancashire. into working-class, Roman Catholic family. Father, the actor Tony Booth, famous for 'Til Death Us Do Part'. Cherie got first class law degree at London School of Economics.

* Youthful experience: At 14, she told the girls in her class she wanted to be first woman prime minister.

* Relationships: Met Tony Blair while both were training to be barristers.

* Is it true she's a fervent Catholic?: No, she's at the liberal end. She believes the church should change its teaching on birth control and women priests.

* Finest hour: Remaining in Downing St for unprecedented third term as Labour First Lady

* Worst Moment: That awful post-Caplin speech about being a modern woman juggling too many balls in the air

* She says of herself: "I count myself extremely lucky to have a fantastic family and the career I always wanted."

* What they say of her: "Is there a more grasping and shameless public figure in Britain than Cherie Blair?" - Piers Morgan

Denis Thatcher

* Background: Born 10 May 1915, Lewisham, south London, son of New Zealand businessman. Educated Mill Hill boarding school. Joined family business at 18.

* Youth experience: Joined the army (Queen's Own Royal West Kent), promoted to major in the artillery, mentioned in dispatches. Awarded MBE in 1945.

* Relationships: Married first to Margaret Kempson, divorced 1948. Met Margaret Hilda Roberts, chemist and politician, at Tory fundraiser 1950. Married 1951. Twin children, Mark and Carol, 1953.

* Jackpot years: Moved into Downing Street in 1979. The first item unpacked from the back of his car on moving-in day was his bag of clubs.

* Is it true he was hen-pecked?: When asked who wore the trousers in his household, he said: "I do. And I wash and iron them too."

* He said of himself (on receiving an honorary degree for being an "English gentleman"): "It is an honour that I have neither earned nor deserved."

* What they said of him: "Denis, the calmest man I know - as long as the bacon at breakfast is to his taste." - Lord Deedes