An explosive new book, serialised exclusively in the Mail, has exposed how the Blairs have amassed a vast fortune since Tony stood down as Prime Minister.
On Saturday, we told how he had turned himself into ‘a human cash register’. Today, we reveal how Cherie has also made her fortune — and how the couple have grown apart since revelations about Tony and Rupert Murdoch’s wife . . .
Today, seven years after leaving Downing Street, Tony and Cherie Blair live very separate lives. When he stopped being Prime Minister, they appear to have lost that instinctive feel for each other that had made them such a formidable and mutually supporting couple. These days, their business empires are entirely separate. They do not work together and are seldom seen together.
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Just six months ago the newspapers were full of Cherie — her 60th birthday approaching — with her daughter Kathryn at a charity function in London. Of Tony there was no sign whatsoever.
Middle East sources have told us that Cherie is never with him on the two to three days a month he spends in the region in his capacity as peace-building envoy for the United Nations-led Quartet.
She does go to the region for her own business, but always at times when he is not there. Not one of the numerous Middle East correspondents we spoke to remembered seeing the Blairs together in recent times.
Neighbours at their grand London home in Connaught Square, Bayswater, report the same thing. Cherie is seen a lot, wandering about the huge house, going to the odd community event and looking depressed. Tony is seldom around, and they are never seen together.
What is going on in their once very visibly close marriage? Might they even divorce? We put these questions to two people who know the Blairs very well.
The first paused for a very long time and then said: ‘I can only say that, if Cherie were contemplating divorce, Tony would do everything he possibly could to dissuade her.’
The other said: ‘She’ll never divorce him. If he ever was proved to have had an affair, her hatred of the media would be greater than her hatred of him.’
Blair never personally comments on rumours except to deny them.
There is also, of course, the fact they are both Catholics and their church forbids divorce, but their Catholicism is sufficiently flexible for him to overcome that obstacle.
How has it come to this? There seem to be two reasons.
First, the Downing Street years took their toll on the marriage. Against her better judgment, Cherie was persuaded by him to take a prominent role in his public life.
She would rather have concentrated on her legal career — the highly lucrative one that had seen them through financially when he was just an up-and-coming politician. Instead, she was forced into the role of consort, for which she was not at all suited.
Many politicians and friends of the Blairs told us that she had a thoroughly raw deal at No 10, pilloried by the Press and not protected by his spin doctors, who gave priority to the Prime Minister and too often left her hanging out to dry. To this day, she harbours resentments that may have damaged the marriage.
Admittedly, she could also be her own worst enemy — too greedy for the trappings of power, too eager to grab any freebies going.
This was not just media talk. Greg Dyke tells a story of how, when he was a director of Manchester United in the late Nineties, Cherie telephoned him from Downing Street to ask if he could get her discounted United shirts for her children.
Dyke said she could have them free. She replied that she could not take them without payment as they would have to be declared as a gift — but she would like a discount, please.
To observers, such behaviour seemed bizarre and unworthy of her position in the land. It did her reputation harm — and, by extension, his, too.
But it was not just the media that turned on her. It was the relentless Downing Street New Labour machine as well. She was used as a lightning rod for Blair.
The second reason is the rumours of his affairs with other women. Despite his office’s consistent denials, the persistence of those stories cannot have done anything but undermine their relationship.
Then a year ago media magnate Rupert Murdoch, to whom Blair had been close for nearly 20 years, ended his marriage to his very much younger wife Wendi Deng after concluding from entries in her diaries that she had developed a crush on Blair. Murdoch was distressed to discover that the two of them had twice spent time together in secret at his ranch in California when he was away. The 83-year-old Murdoch believes Blair alienated her affections.
Relations between the two men — which began back in 1995 when the media magnate invited the then leader of the Opposition to address one of his luxury corporate conferences and then, impressed by his dynamism, took Blair under his wing — have now broken down completely.
Blair protests his innocence. He telephoned an old business associate in the U.S. and assured him he was not having an affair with Wendi. But the business associate, who also knows Murdoch well, told him that Murdoch thought it was true and did not believe his denials.
The upshot, according to a report in the Guardian, is that Murdoch doesn’t take Blair’s calls and Blair has now stopped trying. ‘There’s nothing Tony can do at the moment,’ said an unnamed source. ‘Rupert won’t see him, he just won’t countenance it.’
This matters terribly to Blair. It will not affect how the British perceive him, and he has pretty well given up hope of salvaging his reputation here. But it does affect how the Americans see him, not only because extra-marital affairs are more damaging there but because the affronted Murdoch carries considerable weight among the rich and powerful.
While Blair deals with these uncomfortable blips in his otherwise charmed (and hugely profitable) new life, Cherie has switched her own life around. She has shrugged off her image as the political wife trailing behind her go-getting husband and spread her wings and now fronts her own burgeoning business empire.
Over the years, her accent has gone from Liverpool to London. Today her language is that of profits, whether it is funding private healthcare clinics in the poorer parts of the UK or guiding businesses through the world’s riskiest markets,
Originally, of course, she was primarily a lawyer, notably as a QC at Matrix Chambers, the group of barristers specialising in human rights that she helped to found. Its website describes her as an ‘expert in discrimination, public law, media and information law and employment law’. She has appeared in the European Court of Justice and is also a Recorder (a judge) in the county court and crown court. She lectures internationally on human rights.
Then, in 2008, the year after leaving Downing Street, she set up an international charity, the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women, to provide female entrepreneurs round the world with access to business development support, networks, finance and technology.
Compared with the funding arrangements of her husband’s deliberately opaque charities, Cherie’s is an open book. Its income in 2012 was £1,818,151 and it employs 11 staff. It even lists donors, which include big commercial names such as ExxonMobil, as well as one of Tony’s employer, banker JP Morgan.
The biggest donor is American media tycoon Haim Saban, the passionately pro-Israel billionaire who also funds the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. So it is hardly surprising to find Cherie’s foundation is very active in Israel.
Cherie goes there with Saban’s wife Cheryl to talk up their funding of places at Western Galilee College for women to study economics, accounting and business administration, and how to provide Israeli business women with capital.
More recently, however, she has set about combining the law and private enterprise in ways that are surprising for someone of her political background and beliefs.
One SUCH enterprise is Mee Healthcare, a firm that sets up a one-shop-suits-all medical, optical and dental service in British supermarkets.
Separate lives: Tony and Cherie, pictured in 2000, do not work together and are seldom seen together
This took off in 2012, when she was reported to be seeking £65 million to help fund a chain of private health clinics. She joined forces with an American private equity outfit to raise money from investors on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her partner is the Allele Fund, founded by Dr Gail Lese, a Republican-supporting American businesswoman. The business is based in the Cayman Islands and in Delaware, a notorious U.S. onshore tax haven.
Mee Healthcare proudly proclaims that it provides ‘a range of premium healthcare and wellbeing services at accessible prices’. Its centres have GPs, dentists, hearing and eye experts under one roof. Cherie told the Financial Times: ‘While this venture is a commercial one, it is not about replacing the NHS or profiteering, but complementing the services it already offers.’
Maybe. But it is private medicine, and it will benefit from moves towards NHS privatisation.
One investor in Mee Healthcare is Tory MP Brooks Newmark — who says he will quit as an MP at the next election, and who had to resign as a junior minister last October after revelations that he was sending sex texts to women and had had an affair.
While Mee puts Cherie Blair in a very visible position on the High Street, another of her big ventures, Omnia Strategy, stays firmly out of sight in its stated business of providing ‘strategic counsel to governments, corporate and private clients’.
Founded by her in 2011, it is an international law firm which makes its money from her claim to have deep intelligence know-how for her clients to draw on. Through it, she has advised governments, including Albania and Bahrain, a pressure group in Nigeria and a company in Egypt.
What it does is not unlike groups such as Control Risks and Kroll, which help companies manage political and security risks, but with a legal rather than a security emphasis.
Omnia claims to: ‘Tackle complex problems that require an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach. We provide a bespoke service and carefully select a tailored project team which may include solicitors, barristers, corporate general counsel, former CEOs, strategy consultants, diplomats, economists, investment bankers and communications specialists from across the globe.’
It is also known to use former intelligence officers and investigative companies.
Some of Omnia’s work may dovetail with the activities of Tony Blair Associates, her husband’s holding company, but the principals on both sides are careful to discount such suggestions.Yet office location provides some support for such a proposition.
Omnia occupies anonymous offices in Great Cumberland Place, in Central London, alongside the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Her Foundation For Women is based there, too. This is a fortress-like building, overlooking Hyde Park, where security is tight.
No one enters without codes and pre-arranged meetings. The Omnia website, like Tony Blair’s various organisations, provides no postal address or phone number.
But it is some of the work Omnia takes on that raises eyebrows. Among its clients is the government of Bahrain, a country which according to a Human Rights Watch report earlier this year has increased restrictions on human rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
Obstacle: The couple have grown apart since revelations about Tony and Rupert Murdoch’s wife
‘Security forces arbitrarily arrested scores of people and there were credible reports of torture and ill-treatment in detention,’ the report said.
It seems sad that such a distinguished, able and passionate human rights lawyer as Cherie should end up in the pay of the likes of Bahrain, which during the Arab Spring relied on imported Saudi troops to keep democracy at bay.
These businesses she is now immersed in tell us two things about Cherie Blair. First, she is, as she has always been, her own woman. She never fitted into the traditional pattern of a Prime Minister’s wife. A seriously clever and independent woman, she has chosen to do her own thing.
And Omnia is nothing at all like Tony Blair Associates. Although it clearly benefits from the contacts she made as his wife, it is the sort of work she might well have done if she had not been married to him.
The second conclusion is less comfortable. Why on earth is this woman, always more Left-wing than her husband and more committed to the welfare state, hawking private healthcare products around the globe? And why is this dedicated supporter of human rights helping the dictators who run Bahrain to stay in power?
Sadly the answer may be the same one that for the past seven years appears to have motivated her globe-trotting husband — greed.
Extracted from Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan, published by John Blake Publishing on March 19 at £20. To order a copy, call 0808 272 0808 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk (P&P free for a limited time).
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2985566/Will-Tony-Cherie-divorced-lead-separate-lives-amid-claims-resents-treatment-No10-closeness-Murdoch-s-ex-wife-friends-asking-explosive-question.html#ixzz3TsCTGgxC
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