Guardian - Catherine Bennett - Oops, she did it again

Some readers may experience a similar problem with Speaking for Myself by Cherie Blair. What, exactly, is her beef? So many of her emotions seem in excess of the facts as they appear. Why is she so extravagantly conceited, for instance, given what she has to boast about? So sexually flamboyant in the absence of discernible interest? What can explain the obsession with gynaecological matters and, even more so, with money?

Like Gertrude, whose behaviour provides too insubstantial a cause for Hamlet's disgust, Cherie's impecunious mother makes an inadequate pretext for her affluent daughter's lifelong miserliness and greed. But what may be most baffling, particularly to historians of the future as they struggle to comprehend how a whole generation came to be duped by the figment that was New Labour, is Mrs Blair's passionate self-pity.

Although she never lets up about 'the press and its relentless campaign to paint me as a grasping, scheming embarrassment', the author supplies no material from this relentless campaign that would enable fair-minded readers to decide for themselves whether her sense of victimhood is justified or, on the contrary, yet more disturbing evidence that the woman who eagerly represented this country on foreign trips was a vainglorious liability on a scale previously unimagined................

To anyone who fears that Blair will never be held account for his misdeeds, this doting assault on his reputation must be, at least, a first step along the road to karma. Should you be passing a bookshop, you may like to add to his pain by flicking through Speaking for Myself and finding the wedding photographs. Mrs Blair says his crotch looks peculiar in them (he's in borrowed underpants!). Most small mammals display a greater need for privacy.