‘While this venture is a commercial one, it is not about replacing the NHS or profiteering.’

– CHERIE BLAIR ON HER PRIVATE HEALTHCARE BUSINESS.

After Tony Blair’s last appearance in Parliament, the Blair family came out of 10 Downing Street, and Blair, smiling, got into the back of the waiting Daimler, on the side nearer the home he was vacating. Cherie came round the other side, stunning in purple, and turned for a moment to wave at the world’s media; and she said, ‘Bye. I don’t think I’ll miss you.’

Blair was furious, as Cherie records in her autobiography:

Sitting there in the back of the Daimler, Tony stony-faced beside me, I stared out of the window as we passed the Cenotaph. He was right to be angry … leaving was to be done on his terms and was to be done with dignity and grace, and what I had just done was neither gracious nor dignified … I sat beside him feeling both foolish and small.

And so, with Cherie’s help, the incident contributed to the general impression of Blair as the charming, socially adept man, and Cherie as the gauche and accident-prone female partner. This fiction would not have survived if the world’s media had been in Hampshire a week later, in the magnificent garden of Charles Powell’s Hampshire home. In fact, this story is made public here for the first time.

The very upper-crust Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, had acted as Prime Minister Blair’s special envoy to Brunei – controversially, because Powell was also on the payroll of BAE Systems, and the company was in dispute with Brunei over the purchase of three warships. One of his brothers is Chris Powell, once Labour’s favourite advertising man, and another is Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff in Downing Street, who became the chief consultant of Tony Blair Associates. Charles pronounces his surname to rhyme with hole, but Chris and Jonathan pronounce it to rhyme with towel.

The occasion was a party to celebrate Jonathan’s marriage to the journalist Sarah Helm, and Sarah made a speech containing a graceful and witty reference to her presence on the anti-Iraq War march. Then, with Cherie seated at the table nearby finishing her dessert, Blair rose.

‘Hi, everybody,’ he said. ‘So now you all know why I decided to resign as Prime Minister. I thought it was time to give Jonathan back to Sarah.’ Then, turning to the happy couple, he added, ‘Anyway, Jonathan was never any good in bed.’

‘There was a kind of nervous semi-silence,’ one of the guests told us. ‘It was so wrong on so many levels. We all tried not to look at Cherie, or Jonathan, or Sarah.’

CHERIE

Cherie Blair is much more socially and politically adept, and much faster on her feet, than people give her credit for – perhaps more than she gives herself credit for. One of us (Beckett) once asked her to sign his copy of her book on prime ministers’ wives. It happened at the same time as our book on Tony Blair’s premiership was out, and the Blairs, with some justice, considered it hostile. She wrote on the cover sheet, ‘To Francis. I promise this is not fiction. Cherie Blair.’ She had barely a second to think. It was quick, witty and clever.

Today the Blairs live very separate lives. As the two stories at the start of this chapter illustrate, by the time they left Downing Street they had lost that instinctive feel for each other that they must once have had. The business empires of Tony and Cherie Blair are separate, and the couple do not work together. They are seldom seen together.

Middle East sources have told us that, during the two to three days a month Tony spends in the region, Cherie is never there. She does go to the region herself, for her own business, always at times when he is not there. None of the Middle East correspondents we spoke to had seen the Blairs together.

Neighbours in Connaught Square report the same thing. Cherie is seen a lot in the square, wandering around the huge house, going to the odd community event, and looking depressed. Tony is seldom seen, and the two are never seen together. People who have worked for the Blair organisation, including Martin Bright, confirmed for us that the Blairs are seldom seen together.

What is going on, we understand, is the disintegration of their once very close marriage. When we heard that lawyers may have been consulted with a view to a divorce, we put it to two people who know the Blairs very well. The first paused for a very long time, refused the option of denying the story, and said, ‘I can only say that, if Cherie were contemplating that, Tony would do everything he possibly could to dissuade her.’ The other said, ‘There has been talk of a divorce for a long time but she’ll never do it. Her hatred of the media would be greater than her hatred of his affairs.’ This person assumed that the rumours of affairs are true, though Blair never personally comments on them except to deny them.

There is also, of course, the fact that 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?

The Downing Street years took their toll on the marriage. Many politicians and friends of the Blairs have told us that, in Downing Street, she had a thoroughly raw deal, pilloried by the press as a surrogate for her husband and not protected by his spin doctors, who gave priority to protecting the PM.

She was persuaded against her better judgement to take a prominent role in Blair’s public life. She would rather have concentrated on her legal career, but she was forced into the role of consort, for which she was not at all suited.

Perhaps she was all the things the media said she was: a bit too greedy for the trappings of power, for the access to freebies. 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 rumours of Tony Blair having affairs with other women have not helped, although Blair’s office has consistently denied them.

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, to whom Blair has been close ever since 1994, filed for divorce from his very much younger wife Wendi Deng in June 2013, and believes that Blair alienated her affections. Murdoch is thought to have confided in his daughter Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, PR man Matthew Freud. The one thing we know for certain is that the once close relationship between Murdoch and Blair has broken down completely.

Blair telephoned an old business associate in the US in 2014 and assured him that he was not having an affair with Wendy Deng. But the business associate, who also knows Murdoch well, told him that Murdoch thought it was true, and that Murdoch did not believe the denials. That much, at least, is certain. Whether or not Blair has been having an affair with his wife, Murdoch believes he has.

This matters terribly to Blair. It will not affect how the British perceive him, but he has pretty well given up hope of salvaging his reputation here. It does affect how the Americans see him, partly because extramarital affairs are more damaging there, but principally because it will destroy his relationship with Murdoch and NewsCorp, which he has nurtured so carefully ever since 1994. His reputation in America is desperately important to him.

CHERIE AND LAUREN BOOTH

Cherie is also now much taken up with the tangled affairs of her own family, stemming mostly from the untidy life lived by her father, the actor Tony Booth. They are a turbulent family – one of her ancestors was John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln. Tony Booth has eight daughters who have three different mothers, and the poverty of Cherie’s childhood was harder to bear because she knew her father was making money as an actor. Nonetheless, Cherie takes a lot of trouble with her now elderly and frail father, and he for his part was quoted in October 2010 as saying that he would do anything for Cherie.

In the same Daily Mail interview, he said he did not love Cherie’s half-sister Lauren Booth.1 ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again. I suspect not,’ the actor told the paper. He sneered at her conversion to Islam, and attacked ‘the things she said about Cherie and Tony, which were unforgiveable’. She had been sent a belated email to tell her of his 2010 stroke, but she had not been in touch, he said.

Few things are as simple as they look. When we spoke to Lauren, two years later, she had never seen the email and did not know her father had had a stroke until we told her.

Lauren had certainly embarrassed Prime Minister Blair by her outspoken attacks on his policies, but so had Tony Booth himself. He made no secret of the fact that he considered that Blair’s government was damaging the welfare state.

When Lauren was a journalist in London, regularly attacking Prime Minister Blair’s policies from the left and finally irretrievably falling out with him over Iraq, there were newspaper stories saying that she was trading on her relationship with Cherie, a relationship which they said had never been close. None of this was true, and the stories were often under the bylines of journalists known to be close to the New Labour spin machine.

In fact, Lauren was a good writer and broadcast performer, quite capable of making her own way in journalism, though the relationship with Cherie did her career no harm. And she and Cherie were close. Right up to 1997, when he became Prime Minister, she was very close to Blair as well – she says she ‘loved him to bits’ in those days.

When Tony Booth nearly burned to death in 1979 by falling into a drum of paraffin during a drunken attempt to get into his locked flat, Tony Blair was a great support to the family, says Lauren.

But Lauren Booth and Tony Blair have not spoken for more than a decade now. Lauren has become a Muslim and a Palestinian activist. Tony Booth suggests in his Mail interview that she did this only to embarrass Blair, but this is not at all likely: she defends her position with detailed knowledge and genuine passion, and is very much on the side of the moderate, tolerant Muslims.

Before all that, in 2000 she and her actor husband Craig Darby and their two daughters went to live in France. After a few years, she told Darby she was going to leave him. The next day he received serious head injuries in a motorbike accident. In the years since then, she has moved back to Britain, become a Muslim, watched her husband recover with agonising slowness, and fought a long and bitter battle with him over custody of their two daughters. At one stage she was taken to court and accused of kidnapping her children. She won, and kept the children, but it cost her £50,000, and the custody battle was still going on when we spoke to her in 2014.

Desperate to raise the money, she turned to Cherie, who lent her £15,000. But Cherie was insistent that it was a loan, and Lauren ultimately could not repay it in time. She petitioned for her own bankruptcy, and the order was made on 10 December 2010.

Lauren found asking Cherie for money very hard. Cherie’s childhood has left her very careful about money. She is very wealthy now of course, but, however much she has, it never seems to be enough to bring her peace.

She feels, we’re told, that she made her life, she went through hardship to put herself through grammar school, that ‘she’ll always be that grammar school girl toiling over her homework.’

The struggle to get by intensified when she studied for the bar, as she recalls in her autobiography:

While everyone else took a break at lunchtime, I stayed in [Lincoln’s Inn library]: reading, making notes and eating my sandwiches … Every week I would buy a loaf and a little round box of Kraft Dairylea with its six triangles of processed cheese wrapped in silver foil. I would keep them on the windowsill and make up one sandwich every day, the cheese getting softer and softer as the summer built up to a heat wave. It was all I could afford.

Greg Dyke tells a story of how, when he was a director of Manchester United in the late 1990s, 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.

Lauren still has a high regard for her half-sister, though the business of the loan put a strain on their relationship. She calls her ‘a woman of great integrity and loyalty’. When Lauren came across a case of a sixteen-year-old Afghan girl in Britain facing a forced marriage, she told Cherie and ‘Cherie got on with it straightaway – I left it with her.’

Cherie communicates with her family in terse text messages: ‘RU OK God bless.’ ‘She’s not mean, she’s not hard-hearted. She might be a bit brusque,’ says Lauren, and adds, ‘It’s good that she still cares about me – I’ve given her a lot of grief over the years.’

Lauren told us she admires the work of Cherie’s Foundation for Women, though regretting its strong focus on Israel – ‘There are a lot of poorer areas around the world.’ The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, set up in 2008, claims to provide women entrepreneurs with access to business development support, networks, finance and technology. At the top of its website is the stern motto, ‘Empowering women, driving growth’.

But that doesn’t mean that just because you’re a woman entrepreneur you can apply to it for help. The Foundation told us, ‘We do not accept unsolicited grant applications. Instead, we work together with our local partners to develop projects in line with our mission statement. We work within a global community of organisations aiming to economically empower women and we welcome new knowledge partners.’

The biggest donor is media tycoon Haim Saban, the billionaire who made his fortune from the children’s television programme Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and his wife, Cheryl.

This is the same American Israeli billionaire who funds the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and, as we have seen, says, ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.’

So it is hardly surprising to find Cherie’s Foundation to be very active in Israel, nor to find Cherie herself going there with Cheryl Saban to talk up their funding of places at Western Galilee College for women to study economics, accounting and business administration, and providing women in Israeli business with capital and mentors.

Compared with her husband’s charities, Cherie’s charity is an open book. It does list donors in its annual report, but it does not put amounts, so that the reader does not know who the big money donors are. The list, naturally, includes JP Morgan. It also includes big commercial names such as Exxon Mobil. Perhaps surprisingly, it also includes USAID, whose purpose is to ‘provide economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States.’2

The Foundation’s income in the year ending 31 October 2012 was £1,818,151 and at that time it employed eleven staff.

Cherie Blair is dedicated to building businesses and making money. Her accent has gone from Liverpool to London, her style from political wife to lead business partner. Today the 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,

To achieve this, Cherie has two routes. One is through developing and commercialising her legal expertise. The other is through financial investment. She is at the same time a hard-nosed consultant to countries and companies and a businesswoman and manager.

Cherie Blair tries to operate beneath the radar. Business people in emerging markets have their enemies in the marketplace but high-profile political folk in business have double the trouble: business competitors and ideological foes.

PRIVATE SECURITY AND PRIVATE HEALTH

One vehicle that Cherie Blair uses is Omnia Strategy, a consultancy she founded in 2011, which makes its money from her claim to have deep intelligence knowhow and plugged-in intelligence sources. Another vehicle is Mee Healthcare, a firm that sets up a one-shop-suits-all medical, optical and dental service in British supermarkets.

Through Omnia Strategy, Cherie has advised governments including Albania and Bahrain, a pressure group in Nigeria and a company in Egypt. Omnia bears comparison to groups like Control Risks and Kroll, which help companies manage political and security risks, but with a legal rather than straightforwardly security emphasis. Synergies between Omnia and Tony Blair’s political and security apparatus are inevitable, although the principals are careful to discount such suggestions.

Yet office location provides some support for such a proposition. Omnia Strategy occupies anonymous offices at 1 Great Cumberland Place, near Marble Arch in Central London, alongside Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, Cherie’s Foundation for Women, her son Nicky Blair’s company (we’ll come to that) and (bizarrely) the London office of her son Euan Blair’s employer (we’ll come to that, too). This is a fortress-like building, overlooking Hyde Park, where security is tight and no one enters without codes and prearranged meetings. The Omnia Strategy website, like Tony Blair’s various organisations, provides no postal address or phone number.

The medical end of the Cherie Blair portfolio took off in January 2012, when she was reported to be seeking £65 million to help fund a chain of private health clinics. She had joined forces with an American fund manager to raise $100 million from investors on both sides of the Atlantic. She was working with the Allele Fund, a private-equity outfit founded by Dr Gail Lese, a Republican-supporting businesswoman. Cherie and Lese are said to be close partners. The business is based in the Cayman Islands and in Delaware, a notorious US onshore tax haven.

Lese’s skill in business management was demonstrated during a brief stint at Fidelity, where she made record returns in record times. Lese, an American, is a qualified doctor and the Allele Fund website says,

Dr. Lese has a deep commitment to public service and volunteerism. Her extensive volunteer service has included serving on the Board of Directors of the Mass Mentoring Partnership, the American Red Cross of Cape Cod and Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Cape Cod; tutoring and mentoring students in the Boston, Los Angeles, and New York public school systems; founding multiple community service programs including a scholarship program to help economically disadvantaged students attend college; service as a volunteer physician at the L.A. Free Clinic; and helping to procure and grant wishes for terminally ill children with the Make a Wish Foundation. Dr. Lese has received numerous recognitions for her distinguished leadership and impact in public service.

The company’s motto is, ‘Your one-stop connection for quality health, wellness and life’. Its strapline states, ‘we will serve you with integrity in all we do’.

The company’s brand name is Mee Healthcare and its website proudly proclaims, ‘Mee provides a range of premium healthcare and wellbeing services at accessible prices.’ Mee’s innovative centres offer GPs, dentists, hearing and eye experts and even pampering services such as manicures and pedicures, all under one roof. Cherie Blair 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.’3

Maybe. But it is private medicine, and it will, whatever way you look at it, benefit from moves towards NHS privatisation.

Allele says its aim is to ‘invest in, build, and grow, a variety of leading international businesses which are committed to making a difference and helping people globally. The Fund’s team takes significant operational roles within fund portfolio companies to steward them to success.’ One investor in Mee Healthcare is Brooks Newmark, a member of the Treasury Select Committee and the Conservative MP for Braintree since the 2005 general election.

While Mee puts Cherie Blair in a very visible position on the high street, Omnia stays firmly out of sight. Its ‘advisory panel’ includes Peter Wilson, a director at Protection Group International (PGI), and he gives Cherie access to ‘experience and expertise from UK government, intelligence, military personnel and commercial organisations’. Wilson tells us his role as a member of Omnia’s advisory panel is unpaid, and he has ceased to be a director of the firm.

Wilson, who worked in the Foreign Office and McKinsey, has investments in a number of hi-tech companies. He describes himself as an adviser to the British government on political reform in developing countries. Wilson wrote a very right-wing book called Make Poverty Business, which claims to construct ‘a rigorous profit-making argument for multinational corporations to do more business with the poor. It takes economic development out of the corporate social responsibility ghetto and places it firmly in the core business interests of the corporation.’ Wilson said that PGI had ‘no business connections’ with Omnia.

Cherie Booth QC, described on the company’s website as Cherie Blair CBE, is the chair of Omnia, whose website says it is a

Pioneering international law firm that provides strategic counsel to governments, corporate and private clients. We 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.

In fact, Omnia Strategy has a rather wider remit of advisers and this includes ‘private investigators’, who are hired to provide intelligence expertise on countries, markets and individuals. Wilson’s profile says,

We [Omnia] are a legal strategy consultancy that helps you achieve your international goals through our integrated expertise in law, governance and economics. We work with you to translate and embed global standards throughout your organisation. We help governments to attract international support and investment by strengthening laws, institutions and practices. We help businesses from emerging markets to become internationally respected, successful companies by strengthening governance, structures and practices.

Cherie’s colleagues at Omnia include Sofia Wellesley, who worked at the Libyan Investment Authority, which Tony Blair and his client JP Morgan got to know very well in the days of the late Colonel Gaddafi. There, she ‘project managed a team to start up the operations of the sovereign wealth fund and to oversee assignments that formulated governance, human resource and asset allocation strategies.’ Wellesley is quite young – still only thirty-one in 2014 – but definitely out of the top drawer: she is descended from the Duke of Wellington and married James Blunt in 2014.

Another partner in Omnia is Julia Yun Hulme, a former lawyer for Tamoil Group – the brand name of Dutch oil company Oilinvest – where she was ‘in charge of all legal aspects of the company including corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, arbitration, compliance and restructuring.’ Oilinvest itself was controlled by a Libyan holding company until civil unrest led to the holding company being wound up in March 2011. This appeared to leave the company without an ultimate owner.

Cementing the company’s Middle Eastern links, Cherie recruited Laura Edwards, a recent Cambridge law graduate, as an analyst to Omnia in August 2013. Edwards is listed as an editor for the ‘Proposed Constitutional Framework for the Republic of Tunisia’, a document put together by Cambridge University’s Wilberforce Society, a think tank that aims to connect students and ‘leading policy makers’.4

Omnia is known to use former intelligence officers and investigative companies to conduct due diligence.

Among its clients is the government of Bahrain. The Sunday Times reported in February 2012:

Cherie Blair is offering her services as a legal and human rights consultant to the Bahraini regime, which cracked down on protests last year. Blair, who visited the country in November, is promoting her services through Omnia Strategy, her consultancy. Other Middle East regimes facing the threat of revolution are being offered her services as an adviser on legal reforms … The consultancy said in a statement that its work was intended to help Bahrain implement reforms which will help safeguard human rights. However, opposition groups are sceptical about the regime’s commitment to reform.5

So they might be. Her husband says the same thing about his Kazakhstan client.

According to a Human Rights Watch report published on 21 January 2014, Bahrain has

It seems sad that a distinguished, able and passionate human-rights lawyer should end up shilling for the likes of the government of Bahrain, which, during the Arab Spring, relied on imported Saudi troops to keep democracy at bay.

Other Middle Eastern clients include the Egyptian construction company Orascom Construction Industries and its London operation called OCI (UK), based at Cork Street, in London’s Mayfair. OCI says on its website that it targets large industrial and infrastructure projects, principally in Egypt and North Africa. It does major commercial, industrial and infrastructure projects throughout Europe and the Middle East and it pursues institutional projects in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Omnia advised the government of Albania in 2012 and 2013 when it was facing a claim from a firm of oil developers called Sky Petroleum. Sky, which is based in Texas, was claiming that the country had illegally stopped a licence it had been granted to explore for oil. Omnia Strategy won the case and Sky had to pay Albania’s costs.

Africa is another marketplace for Omnia. The Bakassi Support Group reportedly hired Omnia in 2012 to prepare a legal brief to review the International Court of Justice’s judgments in a hearing in Nigeria’s capital Abuja on its claim for lost territory, whose sovereignty had been ceded to Cameroon.

Cherie Blair is the founder of Matrix Chambers, but Omnia Strategy takes her closer to the commercial and security application of law, especially in insecure jurisdictions. Matrix Chambers’ website says she is a

high-profile expert in discrimination, public law, media and information law and employment law. She has appeared in the European Court of Justice and in Commonwealth jurisdictions, and also lectures internationally on human rights. Appointed QC in 1995, she is a Recorder in the County Court and Crown Court, a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn and an Honorary Bencher of King’s Inn, Dublin. She is also an accredited Advanced Mediator under the ADR Chambers/Harvard Law Project and an Elite Mediator with Clerksroom.

Cherie Blair sees the law and enterprise as her route to business leadership. These businesses, it seems to us, 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 the prime-ministerial wife. A seriously clever and independent-minded woman, she has chosen to do her own thing. And Omnia is nothing at all like Tony Blair Associates. It utilises her skills and knowledge – and, although it clearly benefits from the contacts she has made as the wife of the PM, it is the sort of work she might well have done if she had not been married to a prime minister (except that she would probably have become a judge).

The second 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 she helping the dictators who run Bahrain with their repressive policies?

EUAN AND NICKY BLAIR

Cherie is actively involved in the careers of her sons Euan and Nicky, both of whom have offices in the concrete tower at 1 Great Cumberland Place, overlooking Hyde Park – an office building that may yet become known as the Blair Tower.

If you look on the plate at the entrance, you would have no idea that this was what went on inside. Other occupants of the building have their company names on the plate – Gherson Solicitors and Michael Berg and Partners, chartered surveyors, on Floor 2, Oil Spill Response Ltd on Floor 1, and so on – but there is no mention at all of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and the occupants of Floor 7 are given simply as ‘CBFW’ and ‘CBO’. The first must be the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, and the second, probably, the Cherie Blair Organisation.

Cherie Blair’s eldest son Euan, born in 1984, started by working in merchant banking with Morgan Stanley, but then took a job with the huge Australian employment agency Sarina Russo Job Access, which started business as an academy in 1979 and has made Sarina Russo a multimillionaire. He started as an adviser, but he is listed at the time of writing as acting CEO UK, in which post he works in the company’s London office.

His profile on their website reads: ‘Before joining Sarina Russo Job Access, Euan worked at Morgan Stanley where he helped raise funding of more than $60Bn for UK companies including Marks & Spencer, National Grid, Vodafone, and Unilever. He has also advised on funding strategies for a number of public sector and charitable clients including Transport for London, Network Rail and the Wellcome Trust.’

Sarina Russo herself is now part of the Blair inner circle – a guest at Cherie’s sixtieth-birthday party in 2014 and at Euan’s wedding, and a friend of both Tony and Cherie. She told an Australian radio station all about it, in a rather cringe-making interview down the line from London:7 ‘It’s really extraordinary – the Blairs are just like the royal family here in the UK.’

As for Euan, she seemed to suggest he takes after his father in being driven by a desire to help the less fortunate: ‘He actually gave up merchant banking … and he was really searching to get a feel of, you know, the people in this country, the homeless, the drug addicts, you know, the disadvantaged. It’s obvious it’s in his blood and he really wants to make a difference, and he’s got the beautiful wife, Suzanne, who’s very much into social finance, and she helps prisoners to get finance so that when they leave jail they’ve got some sort of financial stability.’

How did he get the job?

‘Well, what happened was, he came to me for career advice … and a couple of days, a week later he says, I’d like to work for your company, and he’s told everyone it’s the happiest job he’s ever had.’

The truth is a little more complicated. Euan Blair has had a meteoric rise in Russo’s company: as has been noted, a few months after joining to do business development, he is now the acting UK CEO. This company is very big in Australia but only started working on the English market in 2009. It has five offices in the West Midlands, including its head office in Coventry.

It is its London office from which Euan works though. Russo’s nephew, Michael Pennisi, is one of his colleagues in that office. It is, presumably, not a mere coincidence that Euan Blair’s employer’s office is on the same floor of the same office block as his mother’s and his brother’s companies. But what exactly is the connection between Sarina Russo and the Blairs?

There is also an office in Wembley, where surprisingly the Tony Blair Faith Foundation also has an office.

Euan’s company owes its meteoric rise in Britain – it now has eight offices and employs almost one hundred people – to one contract, and that is a government contract. It is to do with the welfare-to-work programme. The government sends unemployed young people to the company, and the company trains them in such matters as how to write a CV, employability skills and how to dress for interviews. It does so as a subcontractor of Serco, the enormous government outsourcing company.

The company’s ‘vision’ is, according to its website, ‘to constantly innovate and excel at the delivery of exceptional recruitment, education and training services to all clients, candidates and students. This is achieved by the delivery of superior services to all of our customers and fellow staff.’

Euan Blair was at first based in the Coventry office, and was attending meetings of the local constituency Labour Party.8 There was speculation that his ambition was to be a Labour MP, and that working for Ms Russo might look better to a local Labour Party than working for a merchant bank. However, the Coventry connection is now a little academic, since Geoffrey Robinson (born in 1938), whose Coventry North West seat Euan is thought to have had his eye on, announced that he intended to stand again in the 2015 general election. Euan no longer works in Coventry, and his parliamentary ambitions were then thought to rest in Bootle. However, if Euan ever intended to be a Labour parliamentary candidate, he had given the idea up by 2014.

Cherie is also helping her second son, Nicky, develop a sports-management business called Magnitude. She has taken a 20 per cent stake in the company and is a director, and management meetings are held at the Blairs’ Buckinghamshire home. Nicky has a desk and dedicated phone line at the Omnia Strategy headquarters, which is in what we have affectionately termed the Blair Tower, and the Blair Tower is the business address.

Magnitude is a so-called ‘e-sports business’, which manages teams competing on computer games online for prize money. The firm posted an £8,200 loss and according to its accounts, is almost £17,000 in the red. Nicky owns 40 per cent of the business and another 40 per cent is owned by his business partner Gabriel Moraes.

The company came under scrutiny from Westminster Council after Nicky moved it from his home to his mother’s office – and there was concern that Cherie Blair might be breaking council-tax rules by using an office for her two charities and allowing a commercial undertaking to be based there; she gets an 80 per cent discount on business rates because she runs charities.

But the phone line and desk were found by visiting Westminster Council officials to be in Omnia Strategy’s offices, which paid full business rates for the area they occupied.

A council spokesman confirmed that Mrs Blair’s offices, next to Hyde Park in Central London, had been the subject of an unannounced check by officers, who found the space was occupied by three different entities – the two charities and Omnia. Westminster Council decided not to take any further action.

It began as a limited company and in 2013 was turned into a partnership. The last public files at the end of 2012 show that the limited company was dissolved and the directors state that they can cover all their debts. But it meant the end of the gaming business. The decision meant that it no longer filed full accounts with Companies House.

Cherie Blair takes an active interest in the new business, managing foreign football players, which has now been rebranded with an office in Rio in Brazil. Cherie took time out of her busy schedule to meet an unknown Mexican footballer, then seventeen-year-old prodigy Raúl Mendiola, in a Los Angeles hotel. Mendiola is signed to Magnitude, which is acting as his football agent.

So, according to an article in the Mirror, are a number of promising Brazilian stars.9 It reported: “Magnitude Brazil Sports Ltd opened its office in a glass and marble-fronted skyscraper in Rio in 2011 … It now exists solely in South America.’

Over the past two years, Blair and Moraes, with their South American business partners Rafael Fraga and Vinicius Marques, have been signing up talent from Brazil’s biggest clubs. Highly rated players with Magnitude include defender Marlon Santos da Silva Barbosa, 18, who plays for Fluminense, and midfielder Leandro Alves de Carvalho, 17, of Botafogo.

Magnitude Brazil are also said to have an arrangement with Desportivo Brasil, a Sao Paulo club which develops players for top sides.

Effectively Nicky is now working outside the UK with a business solely based in South America and no longer regularly scrutinized in the British media. He is predicted to do very well with his new talent when Brazil and Mexico take part in the World Cup in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022.

Kathryn Blair, who is a barrister, is the one person who has not set up her own business. But she has some musical talent; when she showed some musical curiosity in the early 2000s, Alastair Campbell was asked to contact Chappells, the musical instrument suppliers, to track down a suitable instrument for the PM’s daughter.

Campbell suggested to the head of piano sales that the company might care to donate a baby grand piano worth several thousands of pounds to the PM’s family. The head of piano sales dismissed the call, telling Campbell in no uncertain terms that he could come in and buy a piano like everyone else, and put the phone down.

Shortly afterwards, a piano tuner was summoned to Number 10 to tune an old German baby grand made by the firm Steck. He understood this had been given to the PM’s family by David Putnam, the well-known film producer and friend of the family. According to the piano tuner, the instrument was in a ‘terrible condition’ and needed three visits to sort out and bring to a serviceable state. Nothing further is known about Kathryn’s musical talent but the baby of the family, Leo, had a part in English National Opera’s production of The Magic Flute in November 20 at the age of 13.

While Cherie’s empire cannot be compared to Tony’s worldwide money-making in either scale or content, it does exhibit a similar determination to maximise her wealth by every means possible. There is now far less emphasis on her campaigns for human rights, and much more on her determination to make money from private health and private security. Just like Tony, she has good connections with billionaires, and her sons, Nicky and Euan, are budding entrepreneurs. Both Cherie and Euan look set to benefit enormously from the further privatisation of public services and the NHS.