They thought they had pulled it off . . . just a fortnight before, it appeared as though the only way Blair and Gordon Brown would appear on stage together was if one was armed with an axe and the other was blindfolded and kneeling over a basket, yet here the two men were at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, smiling at each other like a pair of enamoured schoolchildren.

Gordon told the crowd that it had been "a privilege" to work with Tony; Tony reciprocated by describing Gordon as "the best chancellor this country has ever had."

It was a piece of political ballet as carefully choreographed as any production of Swan Lake.

But then it turned into pantomime.

A Bloomberg journalist claimed to have overheard Cherie Blair, the British PM's wife, calling Gordon Brown a liar at the very moment the chancellor was delivering his homage to Tony. The story . . .

which Cherie Blair denies . . . was all over the newspapers the next day, totally destroying the Labour Party's attempts to liken Downing Street to Walton's Mountain.

This isn't the first time that Cherie has stolen the headlines from her husband. The Lady Macbeth of British politics has landed the Blair administration in trouble before.

There was the 'Cheriegate' affair, for example, when Tony's wife first denied, then later admitted to purchasing two cut-price apartments in Bristol with the help of Peter Foster, a convicted con man who was later deported from Ireland.

Cherie's various money-spinning nixers have also attracted much criticism. Last summer, she was paid £30,000 to deliver a speech in Washington on life inside Downing Street, while she had previously received £100,000 for conducting a speaking tour in Australia.

She has also shown quite a penchant for shopping, which, too, has landed Number 10 in hot water.

Last summer, Cherie agreed to publicise a duty-free shopping centre in Malaysia in return for a free holiday, while she came in for criticism in April 2003 when she left a designer clothes showroom in Melbourne with 68 items after being told she could take "a few things" as gifts.

While her high-flying lifestyle might appear to fit with her professional reputation as one of Britain's top family law and employment barristers, it is certainly a long way from the council estate in Liverpool into which she was born.

The future First Lady of Downing Street had a far from comfortable upbringing, something that was almost entirely down to the actions of her father, the famed actor Tony Booth. The harddrinking, womanising Booth loved children, so much, in fact, that he insisted on having a few with many of the women he met.

Booth walked out on his wife, Gale Smith, in 1959 when Cherie was aged five and her sister Lyndsey was three. While Booth was busy setting up franchises of his family with various women, his former wife struggled to make ends meet, and was forced to take a series of poorly paid jobs.

Cherie saw nothing of her father during her early years, although the pair were reconciled in 1979 . . . when Cherie was 25 . . . after Booth vowed to beat the bottle.

As a child, Cherie excelled in school and left Seafield Convent with four Agrades in her A-levels. Liverpool soon gave way to London, as the young Cherie enrolled to study law at the London School of Economics. It was in the hallowed halls of the LSE that she cemented her two careers . . . barrister and political wife, both of which would serve her well.

Of the two, the first was never in doubt.

Cherie graduated from the LSE with first-class honours and subsequently came top of the class in her Bar exams.

The job of political wife was more uncertain, however, not least because her husband of choice . . . a fellow LSE student by the name of Anthony Blair . . . was not very political.

Political aspirations had not yet entered the legal mind of the young Blair.

Indeed, if young Tony had any natural political leanings, it would have been towards the Conservatives, the party his father once had aspirations of representing in the House of Commons.

This would have been enough to make Cherie balk. While she had cut her links to her father, she had remained close to his parents and his sister, all of whom were card-carrying Labour Party members. The Booths instilled in Cherie a passion for left-wing politics and trade unionism, something which she carried into her days in university.

Cherie and Tony got to know each other as students after they were both taken in by Derry Irvine QC, who would later become the British government's Lord Chancellor. Popular legend has it that they fell for each other during a party game in chambers that called for them to pass a balloon between their knees.

Whatever the details were, Cherie and Tony became an item. It was soon after this that Tony hitched his future to the Labour Party, an act that the more cynically minded have suggested was originally merely an attempt to impress his new girlfriend, who had been a member of the party since she was 14 years old.

Of the two, it was Cherie who first expressed parliamentary ambitions.

Shortly after marrying Tony in 1981, she applied for the Labour nomination for a by-election in Crosby, but failed to gather enough support within the party. Two years later, she got the nod for the 1983 general election, but was unsuccessful in the Tory stronghold of Thanet North. By that stage, Tony had also entered the political landscape and he instantly proved more successful than his wife, taking the Labour seat for Sedgefield in northeast England.

Ever since, Cherie has left the politics to her husband, though that is not to cast her in the role of idle celebrity wife.

Anything but, in fact. Originally specialising in defamation, she soon moved into family and employment law. Using her maiden name of Booth in court, Cherie is regarded as one of Britain's top legal minds and is thought to be on course for a seat on the High Court benches in the not too distant future.

As well as a busy legal practice, which, with annual earnings of around £200,000, is worth more to the Blair family than Tony's attempts to run Britain, Cherie has four children to attend to and is, by all accounts, a particularly doting mother to each. Both Cherie and Tony were taken by surprise when little Leo added his name to the residents of Number 10 six years ago, and the family would have been enlarged once more two years later had Cherie not suffered a miscarriage at the age of 47.

With her husband's political career coming to an end, Cherie has denied claims that she intends to take a leaf out of the book of close friend Hillary Clinton by seeking to continue her spouse's dynasty. After this week, surely there is no man more relieved about that fact than Gordon Brown.

C.V.

Born: Bury, Lancashire, 1954
Married to: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, with four children: Euan (22), Nicky (20), Kathryn (18) and Leo (6)
In the news: She caused much embarrassment within the Labour Party by allegedly calling Gordon Brown a liar during his widely anticipated conference speech