"Goodbye. We won't miss you," Cherie Blair told the press, on the day of her husband's handover of power to Just Gordon. Touchingly, it appears that she has missed us, so very much that she's spent every spare minute of her new, less scrutinised life, scribbling away at her memoirs, inviting with their surprise-surprise publication another round of the comment and the speculation she had claimed to be so exasperated by.

Since Mrs Blair is well known to be materially acquisitive and obsessively insecure about income, she must have known that the publication of her autobiography, Speaking For Myself, would be greeted with a barrage of cynical remarks about her greed. It has been, of course. But it appears that Mrs Blair is willing to put up with such accusations, as long as there's money in it. Oh dear.

I've never found all the reports about Mrs Blair's avarice to be particularly compelling. The way people go on, you'd think that she is some sort of weird aberration, a grossly atypical bread-head operating in a society that is otherwise awfully spiritual and not in the least concerned with material wealth.