Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Page A

evening (it was a Sunday, her first back from Bernard Arnault’s yacht on the Côte d’Azure) he had spotted Cherie Blair and another woman coming out of the house adjoining Studzinski’s.
    Were the Blairs considering a move to Chelsea, into the house next door to what had once been known as the Follett house, the house that they had had to stop visiting twelve years earlier because it placed them too close to what the papers called ‘luvvie-land’? There had been reports of them being shown over a country pile calledWinslow Hall in Berkshire and of Tony becoming ‘the local country squire’. (The former Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith had performed the opening ceremony at the local pub, the Betsey Wynne; his wife is called Betsy). Tony had apparently recently been spotted looking for a possible headquarters for his Blair Foundation to promote ‘inter-faith dialogue’ in Manchester Square, where he inspected the former Spanish Embassy at number 23.
    But money was thought to be an issue. Cherie had interrupted the family holiday at Sir Cliff’s Barbados villa in the early part of the summer to fly to the US to give three speeches. In the early autumn it would be announced that she had agreed a rumoured £1 million deal to write her memoirs. A month later Tony would at last announce that he had signed up to write his. The contract was brokered by a Washington lawyer called Robert Barnett who had secured the $12 million deal for Bill Clinton’s My Life . Among Barnett’s other clients were Barack Obama, Alan Greenspan and Benazir Bhutto. Blair’s contract was thought to be worth around £5 million. The publisher was Random House; its UK wing is headed by Gail Rebuck, who is married to Tony’s close ally and former pollster Lord Gould.
    But in early September, according to some of the papers, Cherie was still ‘tearing her hair out’ over her husband’s decision to resurrect his battered reputation by attempting to negotiate peace in the Middle East ‘rather than make the millions she craves’. His envoy role was backed up with a substantial budget drawn from a UN-administered trust fund: his fourteen-strong multinational team were in the process of taking over the entire fourth floor of East Jerusalem’s lovely old American Colony Hotel; an exercise treadmill had been installed, and ornate and gilded Ottoman-looking sofas; there was a shaded terrace screened with newly planted olive and fig saplings. But his peacemaker role was unsalaried. The various foundations carrying his name were going to distribute money, not bring it in. The registered domain name blairfoundation.org remained unused.
    Cherie’s ‘go-getting American manager’, Martha Greene, was said to be considering offers for her to appear in adverts to endorse products, Fergie-style, in the States. With close to £5 million of mortgages on the properties they already owned, and work on their post-Downing Street home in Connaught Square still incomplete, it seemed unlikely that a move to Chelsea was on the cards.
    Far more likely was that Mr Studzinski, a prominent Catholic like Cherie herself, a man with an excess of money – a man with the magic of always being able to make more money, of the type of whom the Blairs had always been in awe – had annexed the house next door to his own with the idea of the former prime minister using it as the headquarters of one of his charities. (Myrobella, the Blairs’ house in Trimdon – opened up to the light, security barriers removed, police gatehouse demolished – was slated to become the home of his sports foundation for local young people, run by Blair’s constituency agent, John Burton, a retired PE teacher.)
    In early June, shortly after the McCanns had their photo of Madeleine blessed by the Pope at a public audience in St Peter’s Square, Tony Blair had had a private audience with Benedict XVI as part of his ‘European farewell tour’. It was rumoured then that he had been received