My sympathies for Cherie Blair, or Booth as she was known in the early days, were such that I would give her the benefit of the doubt time and time again.

Right from the start of her husband's prime ministerial career I have thought how awful it must be to be the wife of the man at Number 10.

Being a "wife of" is an unwinnable position for anybody but particularly for a woman with a career and political opinions independent of her husband.

People run their marriages in different ways and some women are quite happy to be their partner's electoral assets, domestic helps and secretaries.

I don't understand this but I do respect it and I guess for these kind of women there might even be some job satisfaction in being the force behind the prime ministerial throne.

But for women who have no intention of supporting their husbands in this way there is very little to be gained from being the wife of the PM and a lot in terms of privacy and leading your own life to be lost.

Cherie Blair has never been a clothes horse but her dress sense came under scrutiny from the start of the 1997 General Election campaign.

When, for her husband's sake, she took the trouble to learn a little sartorial savvy, she was criticised for liking her designer clothes too much and comments about the cost of her outfits sniped throughout the press.

Sadly the Sir Denis Thatcher style of prime minister's spouse is not available to women. Women will be scrutinised for the way they look and smile and hang on to their husbands' every word while male spouses can drink gin, keep up their business interests and wear bog standard suits without anybody thinking any the better or worse of their partners for it. I'm sure many of the attacks on Cherie in the early days were from people who felt threatened by a woman who succeeded in being a political activist, top class barrister and mother of three, as she was at the time.

For all the reasons I would defend Cherie when she committed her many gaffes - her tears when she apologised for enlisting the help of a public fraudster to help buy two flats in Bristol, being photographed having her make-up put on. "Well," I would think, "none of this is very elegant but she never asked to be in the public eye and there is no reason why she should be a PR whizz kid as well as everything else."

But Cherie has ceased to be defendable.

Earlier this year she went on tours of Australia and Washington where she was paid thousands of pounds for talking about her life as the wife of Tony Blair.

It is very sad when a woman with a perfectly good career in her own right trades off her husband's status in this way.

As soon as she capitalised on her "wife of" status she lost her right to leniency on the grounds of her unenviable position.

Now it has been revealed a charity received only #7,000 from one of her gala dinners in Australia while the rest of the #81,000 generated was taken up by her fee, the commission of the tour organiser and costs. The charity faces closure as a result. Strictly speaking this is not Cherie's fault but it is a scenario which is incongruent with her socialist principles nonetheless.

Cherie has become nothing but an embarrassment. I feel foolish for having stuck up for her for as long as I did.