Cherie demeans the legal profession and must resign over her £1million memoirs, says disgusted judge

Cherie Blair should resign as a part-time judge over the "complete lack of decency" in her £1million memoirs, a top legal figure demanded yesterday.

Former senior judge Gerald Butler QC accused Mrs Blair of demeaning the legal profession.

He said: "If she wants to tread this path of making money by outrageous comments that is up to her.

"But I don't think this is a job for a judge. It shows a complete lack of any kind of decency."

Senior criminal barrister John Cooper, while not commenting directly on the wife of the former Premier, said: "One of the most important factors in being a judge is being able to exercise judgment and part of that is being trusted with confidential material.

"One has to be very careful, in my view, in what one exposes to the public gaze. I know of no High Court judge who has written their memoirs before they have retired."

Speaking For Myself, which went on sale with price cuts yesterday, contains intimate details of life at Downing Street and indiscreet remarks about members of the Royal Family and world leaders.

It has already drawn much criticism, particularly from the brother-in-law of David Kelly, the scientist who killed himself after being outed as the source of a damaging story on Iraq's weapons.

But Mrs Blair was unrepentant in a radio interview yesterday.

"To tell the story about being in Number 10 and not to mention David Kelly I think would be actually really impossible," she told Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

Asked if she would resign as a recorder, she insisted: "I certainly won't. The law is very much an important part of my life. I have enjoyed the law and I intend to continue to practise."

She won support from an unlikely source when Gordon Brown said he had "enjoyed" working with the Blairs and had "nothing but praise" for the work they did for the country.

Judges can be removed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, if their conduct is seen to be putting the reputation of the judiciary at risk.

However, the Bar Standards Board, which oversees barristers, said it had received no complaints about Mrs Blair's memoirs.

Former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer said: "Cherie is highly respected in the legal profession and it is wrong to suggest that writing her memoirs should make the slightest bit of difference to a job she does extremely well."

The memoirs reveal how Mrs Blair's parting jibe at the press - "Bye, I won't miss you!" - had angered her husband and wrecked his carefully stage-managed departure from Downing Street last June.

She recalls: "He was right to be angry. Leaving was to be on his terms and was to be done with dignity and grace and what I had done was neither gracious nor dignified.

"It was Tony's day. I sat beside him feeling both foolish and small."

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The row over Mrs Blair's book came as latest figures revealed that in the 12 months to April last year she earned less than £70,000 as a legal aid QC and a judge, raising the suggestion that publication - originally due in October - had been brought forward for financial reasons.

Money worries are a continual theme in the book and the Blairs are believed to have a mortgage debt approaching £10million.

Mrs Blair insisted yesterday, however: "I didn't do it for the money. I did it because I wanted to speak for myself.

"The publishers took the decision that this was a good summer read and that's why we wanted to publish in the summer."