Blair tactics: What Cherie did next

There is, of course, a TMI (Too Much Information) moment during my interview with Cherie Blair. It happens when I ask how she and Tony spend time together, when they're both back home in Connaught Square after a hard week bringing peace to the Middle East (him) and setting up a further studies scholarship programme for African legal practitioners (her). Do they go out for dinner, catch up on geopolitical opinions, go for a walk? Cherie smiles even more widely than normal. 'Tony and I have been married 31 years and known each other more like 35 years, and even after 35 years,' she gurgles with laughter, 'he still excites me, in all possible ways.'

Spending an afternoon with Cherie has otherwise been a nice surprise: she is warm, devoid of airs and graces. She talks formidably fast, but looks at me with big, slightly helpless eyes framed by long spidery lashes ('all my own, actually'); a combination of vulnerability and steel. She is delightful to everyone we meet, even random film students (she sees them standing about with a TV camera and marches over to say hello; they seem totally nonplussed until, phew, one of them realises who she is and asks for a photograph).

Although still programmed to meet and greet at every opportunity, she's much more relaxed than she was as the PM's wife. She doesn't mind not going to the royal wedding. 'Quite rightly, the present political leaders and their wives are invited. They don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry there. Obviously I'd have been delighted to go but I'll probably get a better view watching it on telly I remember Tony and I went out to watch the fireworks for the last royal wedding [Charles and Diana's], and I couldn't see, and he took me on his shoulders. Well, he couldn't do that now. He'd probably collapse...'

Cherie's husband was the last Prime Minister never to use email. When he left the job, she showed him how. 'It was the worst thing I ever did. How stupid I was. Now he's wedded to his BlackBerry.' Cherie is equally addicted to her iPad, and as it happens, one of her charitable missions is a bid to bring mobile phones to women entrepreneurs in the developing world. She shakes a black and white glass bracelet on her wrist, 'designed', she explains, 'for Western taste, made by women in Rwanda - the wonderful African woman, who is probably looking after other people's children as well as her own, who is "traditionally built", as Precious Ramotswe would call it' - Cherie loves the novels of Alexander McCall Smith - 'who is the backbone of her community.' There's a flat Mersey 'a' in the way she says 'planted'. She sighs. 'I look at that woman and then I come home and I think, "I'm worrying about the size of my bottom?" '

Cherie first visited Rwanda in 2005 with Laura Bush. This year, she founded the Africa Justice Foundation, a scheme to send qualified Rwandan lawyers to the UK for advanced legal postgraduate degrees and work placements before they return to guaranteed jobs in the Rwandan Ministry for Justice. The foundation hopes to expand into Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and today we are on the campus of Queen Mary College, University of London, to meet some of the foundation's scholars.

'They are all hugely idealistic, as I was when I was starting out as a barrister, believing, as I still believe, that law can change the world. People might think it's more important to work on delivering solar power or water, but the law is the fabric of a functioning society.' She is a hands-on director, selecting the scholars and wangling tuition fees herself. 'I managed to get the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies to let us have three students for the price of two.' When I ask one scholar, Isabelle Karihangabo, about Cherie's work, she shakes her head: 'I am speechless with appreciation.' Another student, Ruth Ikiriza, got to know the Blairs' daughter Kathryn, now 23, when she did work experience at the Rwandan Ministry of Justice. 'We went hang- gliding, she met my family. She's a lovely girl.'

'It made a deep impression on Kathryn,' says Cherie carefully. She has always patrolled her children's privacy, putting an injunction on a former nanny's tell-all memoir in 2000. 'Kathryn has a huge commitment, as some of the other children at her school came from Rwanda, it being a Catholic school and Rwanda a Catholic country.' At 18, Kathryn also went to help the nuns of Lazarus in an orphanage in South Africa, working with children with disabilities and HIV, keeping up the family emphasis on good works. 'She's decided she'd like to be a barrister,' says Cherie. 'I'm thrilled. She first announced aged nine that she wanted to be a QC like Mummy. I always thought it was because when I would take her to my chambers at the weekends there was a constant supply of chocolate biscuits.'

As for the other Blair children, Nicky is training to be a solicitor; Euan is a banker - and what of Leo? 'Leo's been on the school debating team, even though he's only in year six [aged ten], so it's rather challenging for him. If any of my children wanted to be politicians I'd be absolutely delighted.'

Although Cherie herself stood for Parliament in 1983 ('Ah, what could have been,' she sighs jokily), she denies she has been tempted to make a Hillary Clinton-style power grab later in life. 'Well, for a start, it's a different system in this country. And then, how do you make a difference? I'm extraordinarily fortunate and I think I can do more good work with my Africa Justice Foundation and my women's foundation [The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women]. And I think we chose wisely. Tony's the better politician and I'm the better lawyer, and he would agree with me on that.' When they both sat their Bar Finals in 1976, she came top of the year, while Blair's name, as she observes in her autobiography, 'was nestling in the Third Class section'.

She went on to become the 76th woman QC in the country and a joint founder of the egalitarian Matrix Chambers. She sits as a judge, is emeritus chancellor at Liverpool John Moores University, has just become chancellor of the University for Asian Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and is linked to over 40 charities. Ed Miliband also asked her last week to chair a review of Labour policy, specifically to examine how women in developing countries get involved in business and public life, raising her prospects of getting a seat in the House of Lords. And she was recently recruited by Jamie Oliver to teach human rights on his Channel 4 Dream School project. 'Wife of the Prime Minister isn't a job,' she says, 'but it is a platform.' Unlike the Clintons or the Gateses, who share joint philanthropic foundations, Cherie and Tony have one each, though her women's foundation has more modest aims. 'Compared to his geopolitics, my tiny foundation plays a very small part. I don't believe women are the same as men. We are better at practical things. My aims are raising women's status and giving them a stake in the future.'

She links her interest in women's rights back to her childhood, which became highly matriarchal after her father, the actor Tony Booth, walked out and started two other families. 'Women are very important to me; I was brought up by my mother and grandmother.' It still affects her thinking: 'Research shows that if you give development dollars to a woman, 90 per cent of it will go back into the family and the community. The figure for men is 30 or 40 per cent. I think the trouble is that there are men like my father who pay very little indeed and pull the average down.' She says this without bitterness - she has a good relationship with her father - but with a knowing clarity. Most men are not Tony Booth, though. 'As a mother of three boys I very much believe that they will not be like that.' She encourages me on the subject of starting a family. 'I'm 100 per cent in favour of marriage. I warn you, no time seems the right time to start a family. When I had my first child I was 29 and I was put down as an "elderly" mother. Then, when I had my fourth at 45, I really was.'

Her half-sister, the journalist Lauren Booth, recently converted to Islam. Cherie found out in an email sent to all the family, shortly before the news 'broke' in the press, and responds with practised patience. 'As a person of faith I'm glad she has found a faith and I hope it helps her with what has been a difficult life.' (Lauren grew up with her parents locked in what Tony Booth has described as a 'mutually ruinous' relationship.) 'I hope it gives her as much strength as my faith gives me.'