Aide attacks Cherie over guru

Cherie Blair today came under fire from a former aide over her links to style guru Carole Caplin, her use of "weird practitioners" and her financial decisions.

Fiona Millar, Mrs Blair's former assistant and the partner of Alastair Campbell, hit out publicly for the first time at a string of " misjudgments" by the Prime Minister's wife.

Laying bare the extent of her disillusionment, Ms Millar said her advice was increasingly ignored as she lost the battle for Mrs Blair's "heart and mind" to Ms Caplin.

Ms Millar quit her post last year, several months before Mr Campbell stepped down as the

Prime Minister's director of communications and strategy.

Mrs Blair is due to give her first TV interview tonight when she appears on Channel 4's Richard and Judy show. She will promote her new book, The Goldfish Bowl, about the life of a spouse in No 10. It is published next week.

Ms Millar and Mr Campbell were close friends as well as colleagues of the Blairs for nearly 10 years until they left Downing Street. Tensions between the couples were known within Westminster, but until now there has been no hint of public criticism of Mrs Blair.

Writing in today's Guardian, Ms Millar stresses she sympathises with the pressures Mrs Blair faced, but makes clear her unease at the way the Prime Minister's wife has changed her behaviour since arriving at Downing Street.

"Even as a minnow in the goldfish bowl, I found the requirement to toe the line politically ultimately overbearing, and suspect that the pressure to conform and perform in so many other ways took its toll on Cherie," writes Ms Millar. " Perhaps it contributed to some of the

ill-fated decisions of the past few years as she struggled to assert her independence against the system which I, in particular, represented."

Ms Millar says Ms Caplin, a former model hired to help Mrs Blair with her make-up, health and fashion, took on a powerful role.

She writes: "My advice was being increasingly ignored as I, the dour Left-wing feminist, began to lose the battle for Cherie's heart and mind to the glossy sex symbol Carole "the Conqueror" Caplin, and left Downing Street."

A key moment in the rift came during "Fostergate", when it was revealed that Ms Caplin's boyfriend, conman Peter Foster, had helped to arrange the purchase of two Bristol flats for the Blairs.

"Most destructive of all was the misjudgment of Peter Foster, the loyal but ultimately damaging decision to stick by Caplin after her full flakiness was revealed to the world on TV, and to a lesser extent the weird practitioners and the decisions about money."

Last week it emerged Mrs Blair was upset she could not claim travel expenses for driving from Chequers to London without her husband. She has frequently taken advantage of free clothing and other gifts.

Stories have abounded of her using crystals and gemstones for her spiritual health. Bharti Vyas, an Indian alternative health specialist, was her counsellor when she was pregnant with Leo.

Ms Millar stresses all these issues were "fairly trivial matters which led to disproportionate public vilification" by the press. But she hints she would have advised the Prime Minister's wife not to go on a ?150,000 speaking tour in the US. Mrs Blair has faced criticism over next month's visit to Washington.

Saying Mrs Blair is right to focus her book on her predecessors, not herself, Ms Millar writes: "A book about your own time in Downing Street would ... be seen as cashing in. Publicity surrounding the book has been sufficiently anodyne to deflect any such criticism. The same might not be true of Cherie's imminent and reportedly lucrative speaking tour."