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OK, I KNOW, my opinion of Cherie Blair has never been what you could describe as high.

But with the lightning publication of her tawdry memoirs this week, my opinion of her is now lower than a snake's backside.

This, remember, is the woman who's spent the past 10 years battling to preserve her family's privacy.

And moaning about the media to anyone stupid enough to listen.

And now we know the reason why.

Cherie doesn't mind invading her own privacy, that of her own family or anyone else's.

So long as the price is right.

Her actions are sheer hypocrisy. She's the woman who hissed: "Goodbye, I don't think we'll miss you" at the media when she and Tony quit Number 10.

Yet, in less than a year, she's back in the very same media, desperately peddling stories of what she calls her "walk-on part in history".

The book's called Speaking For Myself. But Coining It would have been more accurate.

Because nothing, if it shifts a few extra copies and puts a few more quid in the Blair bank account, seems off-limits.

Eight years ago when it was a major public issue, Cherie refused to say whether little Leo had received the MMR jab.

Mums were living in fear, doctors were going frantic.

Just one word from her would have reassured many parents that the controversial vaccination was safe.

But she refused.

Now the media chequebook's open, Cherie is happy to invade Leo's privacy herself, to tell us he did have the vaccination after all. Next up is her sex life, where she explains how Leo came to be conceived during a cold night at Balmoral because she hadn't packed her "contraceptive equipment".

Like a bargain-bin Diana, who is also chucked in for make-weight, Cherie believes there were three people in her marriage: Tony, herself and Gordon Brown.

And, where Gordon's concerned, she's got more unfinished business than Enron.

She moans about Tony "telling Gordon" about her pregnancy.

She bitchily wonders if it was Gordon who leaked the news to Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror. (Gordon's mates say it wasn't.) She didn't want Morgan to "have a big scoop over my body" but again, is happy to reveal the most intimate information about her body, when there's money to be made. Gordon gets it in the neck for destroying her carefully-calculated family budget, by refusing to allow Labour ministers to take a 26 per cent pay hike when they first took office.

(In the days when he was still in touch with ordinary people's views, obviously.) "I remember sitting at the table in the kitchen at Number 10, putting my head in my hands and staring at the now completely redundant financial breakdown," she says, evoking an image of some downtrodden Scousewife whose family is living on the brink, not for free in Number 10.

The fact that all this has come out in the week when millions are being told to tighten their belts as they face mortgage misery, fuel cost hikes and soaring food prices is entirely lost on Cherie Antoinette.

As is the unforgivable crassness of her comments about the family of the dead weapons expert, Dr David Kelly.

After meeting them at Chequers, Cherie snaps: "It was clear to me that what had made Mrs Kelly's life even more intolerable was the behaviour of the press after he killed himself, to the point of taking pictures through their front windows, utterly failing to respect their privacy at all."

So, Cherie criticises the press, in the press, while invading a bereaved family's privacy, in print, for cash to benefit her own brood. You couldn't make it up.

It's customary to finish a piece like this with the words "shame on her".

But what's the point? Cherie Blair is as Shameless as the Gallagher clan in the series of the same name.

And, her self-serving, money-grubbing book makes her look even more vulgar.

7:00pm Friday 16th May 2008

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