SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE: Tony Blair's brother wins top legal job (sorry Cherie!)
Since he was forced out of Downing Street, Tony ‘moneybags’ Blair has amassed a fortune of £100 million and acquired a reputation for hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
The high-flying career of his elder brother, Sir William Blair QC, by contrast has been marked with more dignity and restraint.
High Court judge Sir William, 65, was, I learn, promoted this week to Judge in Charge of the Commercial Court.
Sir William was always regarded by friends as ‘the proper lawyer’ in the Blair family, unlike Tony, who is three years his junior.
Best man: Tony Blair (left) is pictured at the 1982 wedding of his brother William, a High Court judge (right)
Both brothers went to Fettes independent school in Scotland and Oxford University before practising at the Bar. ‘Tony Blair was never a very good lawyer,’ says my Blair watcher. ‘He was just doing employment tribunals. He would never have got anywhere from what he did. He was very lowly. William did understand the law.’
The siblings get on well — Tony was Sir William’s best man at his 1982 wedding — but unlike the permatanned former premier, Sir William is said to shy away from publicity.
He was sworn in as a judge in 2008 just months after Tony stood down as Prime Minister.
Cherie, 61, must have mixed feelings about her brother-in-law’s elevation. His promotion comes just months after she announced she was quitting her role as a judge to focus on her work with Omnia Strategy, the international law firm she founded.
She said it was time for a ‘new guard’ and she wanted to see more women coming through the ranks.
Barrister Cherie had been a Recorder — a part-time judge — in the County and Crown Court since 1999. She long held a burning ambition to be promoted to High Court judge, but various mishaps blotted her copybook.
These included the occasion she was forced into a humiliating apology after first denying, then admitting, she used convicted conman Peter Foster to help her buy two flats in Bristol at a knockdown price in 2002, while Tony was PM.
Fashion queen Anna Wintour (left) says designer Karl Lagerfeld (right) was so desperate to ingratiate himself that he added a tennis court to his French home
Lagerfled built me a tennis court, says Windtour
Fashion queen bee Anna Wintour says scary-looking designer Karl Lagerfeld was so desperate to ingratiate himself that he added a tennis court to his French home — just for her.
American Vogue boss Anna (pictured with the designer), who is a regular spectator at Wimbledon, boasts: ‘Karl built a tennis court on his property at Biarritz as an enticement for me to visit. Needless to say, this was the first and surely the last time anyone has constructed sporting turf in my honour, but Karl was trying to give me somewhere I could feel at home . . . where I could be myself.’
Anna, 66, adds that she would like to be reincarnated as Lagerfeld’s ‘extremely beautiful and bourgeois cat’, Choupette. The spoiled moggy has ‘two maids, a chef, personal hairdresser and many diamond necklaces’.
Luvvies used to bond over raucous nights in the Groucho Club. Now they yammer over the yoga mat. Actress Lesley Sharp says of Toby Jones, her co-star in BBC1’s credit crunch drama, Capital: ‘I know Toby very well, we’ve done yoga together in the past and get on very well. He’s a fantastic actor, but also extremely good company, very witty, and smart.’ Perhaps they’ll get an ashram together.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s moment of Mao madness brought back bitter memories for Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter Theo Bertram: ‘This Red Book thing reminds me I once had to kill a Gloria Gaynor section in a major Gordon speech.
Awful idea. But at least we killed it.’ To which former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith snorted: ‘You spoilsport. It would have been fabulous!’
Britain's shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is quoting from Mao's Little Red Book after Chanceller George Osborne's delivery of the Autumn Statement
What does a Liberal Democrat grandee do when he finds himself ejected from the House of Commons by an ungrateful electorate?
Well, if you are John Thurso, you get a plum job overseeing the pay and expenses of your erstwhile colleagues.
The luxuriantly bearded peer, MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross for 14 years before losing to the SNP in May, has been selected to join the board of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa).
Viscount Thurso will get £400 for each of the two exhausting seven-and-a-half hour days he is expected to work per month. Ipsa is obliged to have an ex-MP on its board, and the role will have been attractive to dozens of members evicted from their seats in May.
But the taxpayer still footed a bill that will have run into tens of thousands of pounds for recruitment firm GatenbySanderson to identify candidates and draw up a five-strong shortlist with an independent panel.
Thurso is seen as an ally of John Bercow, having served with the Speaker on the Commons Commission when it signed off plans to spend £1 million over this Parliament issuing MPs with top-of-the range iPads and laptops.
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