Oh Ma Cherie!

If you have the balls to be 21st century working woman, with four children, a high profile husband, a nation8217;s pride to uphold and a po...

If you have the balls to be 21st century working woman, with four children, a high profile husband, a nation8217;s pride to uphold and a political party to safeguard, you better be a master juggler.

The wife of the British prime minister, Cherie Blair, currently in the eye of a furious media scandal over a property deal brokered by an Australian conman, has made a quavery public statement in which she has said, 8216;I am not Superwoman. The reality of my life is that I am juggling a lot of balls in the air8230;some of the balls get dropped.8217; Cherie Blair met the ex-convict, who has been jailed both in Australia and England, through another friend, a former topless model and New Age guru.

In her statement she said she had done nothing wrong, had only wanted to protect her family and had purchased one of the apartments for her son. Now the ball is in the court of public opinion. Perhaps New Labour is becoming enslaved by an excess of New Agism. The stiff upper lip is not sipping sherry anymore. Instead Cherie has been tuning into misleading inner voices and perhaps sipping too many recycled potions.

Tony Blair8217;s Cool Britannica might drown in a psychic shower of sleaze or become a prisoner of uncool con therapists. 8216;I8217;m sure,8217; said Mrs Blair, 8216;that many working women will identify with me.8217;

Undoubtedly, working women all over the world are a ballsy brigade. In India, surveys say women make up the majority of the informal economy workforce, most of whom work an 18-hour day. But they don8217;t juggle balls in the air, most of them are content to juggle the bouncers dealt them by the air, like the odd cyclone or drought.

Also here in the former colonies, political women don8217;t need any lessons from the memsahibs on how to set the ball rolling on the acquisition of property. Whether we consider the nice acreage owned by the queen of the Dravida movement, or the lavish country estate owned by a Daughter Of The East, who after years in luxurious exile is now anxious to return to the homestead in Sindh or the shoe collection owned by the wives of Southeast Asian dictators, or indeed the gracious Lutyens bungalows owned by the daughters-in-law of the Constitution-creating chachas, we may find that buying a bit of real estate for our superwomen is never as much of a ballsup as it has become in the case of Cherie Blair.

Nor is the law an issue. When it comes to the economic relations between politicians and conmen, we have always played hardball.