Cherie's game for anything

Almost six months into New Labour's "historic" full second term, history is indeed being made. In fact, Mr Tony Blair has gone wild with innovation. One minute he's allowing the de facto decriminalisation of dope, the next he allows his Chancellor to make the remarkable admission that saving the NHS might actually require some of our money.

Yet these pleasant surprises seem trivial compared with the breakthrough which seems to have been slipped through unnoticed: Cherie Blair has been let off her leash. Listening to Cherie last week correcting a common misapprehension about the plight of women in Afghanistan (until her speech, I was sure the Taliban were in the vanguard of feminist thinking), an amazing realisation occurred ... that this was the very first time I'd ever heard her voice. And a very nice voice it is too - deep, almost husky Received Pronunciation with a hint of Scouse bubbling under. Imagine Alvar Lidell reading the wartime news just after swallowing Ringo Starr and you're there. And then this week, to confirm the volte-face, Alastair Campbell signed her release papers again so she could offer sympathy to the mother of poor Damilola Taylor.

It is possible that Cherie was occasionally let out in the first term (I seem to recall her in a sari at the time when Mr Blair was happy to suck up to the Hindujas), but on the whole, when not in court, she stayed as obscure as Arthur Daley's 'er indoors. Or Mrs Brezhnev. Or one of Mullah Omar's missuses, come to that, in Kabul.

You can understand the thinking. That picture of her on the dance floor, grinning to the point at which a double-decker bus or small commuter train could have parked in her gob, was not flattering. Nor was the 3 May 1997 snap of her answering the door to receive flowers, in a nightie, with her hair expertly teased into shape by the in-house stylist from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Meanwhile, there was some well-founded paranoia about the Right's eagerness to paint her as Lady Macbeth (Lady Hillary Rodham-Macbeth, to be precise). Behind the scenes, of course, she had her part to play: when, for one intriguing instance, the black Tory peer John Taylor made his shock-horror discovery about Conservative racism, I gather it was fellow barrister Cherie who made first contact on the phone. But this futile attempt to secure a useful defection never became public knowledge, and she remained hidden behind her metaphorical burqa.

Today, we see a new Cherie - no longer all-dancing, perhaps, but all-talking, all-smiling, all-comforting and all over the place. What the future holds for this formidable woman is unclear, but it does seem a shame that Celebrity Squares is no longer peak-time viewing. I'm not suggesting she's quite ready for that crucial centre square yet, but a middle berth on the bottom row, sandwiched between Roger de Courcy and Nookie Bear to the left and Pam Ayres to the right, wouldn't be beyond her. Then again, there's always Blankety Blank, presented by Lily Savage, another husky-voiced Scouser with an odd taste in frocks. Cherie should feel right at home there.

However, the only possible good reason for FIFA ever to seed England is to take advantage of the rule that, in the early stages at least, keeps each seed based in one place. In England's case, that should be the city best equipped with riot police and water cannons.

For the 2006 World Cup in Germany, there would be every chance of a top seeding. But Japan and South Korea are so far away, and have such notoriously brutal police, that there is no urgent need to reward this country for its sustained world leadership in the arts of bar-wrecking, public vomiting and general football thuggery.