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Carole Caplin, a one-time topless model, was befriended by an exhausted Cherie Blair so that she could realign her chakras and facilitate discounts with obscure designers. Now it turns out she also used to give "long massages" to Tony Blair at Chequers. So writes Lord Levy in his political misery memoir, with a nudge, and a wink, and possibly a little tap dance. It seems odd that a woman who was willing to go to war with her husband's old friend Anji Hunter would allow Carole, of all people, a free pass to her husband's shirtless back.
I've seen Caplin only once and she struck me as a very particular sort of woman, one who sees herself as a sex object and doesn't want to be taken seriously. She gatecrashed a friend's book launch, looking svelte if a little too tanned in a McQueen dress. He spotted a mile off that she had a "kind of peasant cunning"; a sort of energy and confidence in her own glamour that obviously enchanted Cherie, like a swotty girl befriending an airhead at school in the hope that the insouciance will rub off.
Most men can't crystallise a type as neatly as my friend (look at Paul McCartney) but most women can; as a female friend puts it: "We have a sixth sense about women like that." To clarify, the warning signs of a Caplin type: 1.That tan. These women describe themselves as "sun worshippers".
2. Long, loose hair, regularly tossed with manicured fingers, which reminds everyone of their free-love mentality. 3. Intense physicality — these women always invade your personal space and throw their arms round you and your husband — it's all about touching (funnily enough, Lord Levy himself is Caplin's male counterpart in this respect). 4. Their body is a temple: they have a pious obsession with everything they eat and drink and also with exercise. This involves saying lots of things to draw attention to their physique, in fact talking of little else. Their simultaneous vanity and lack of self-awareness is unnerving. 5.
They are always bossy; any "dippiness" conceals steeliness. 6. There is usually a pushy, batty mother lurking somewhere responsible for all this.
The masterpiece of revenge on the type was Sofia Coppola's in Lost in Translation: the gurning, conniving blonde Kelly was said to be based on Cameron Diaz, who'd made Being John Malkovich with Coppola's (now ex) husband, Spike Jonz.
Cherie's antennae seem less sharp. She chose to take on Anji Hunter, her husband's helpful confidante, rather than the dextrous masseuse who's still making both her and her husband look nuts.
Catherine Ostler is editor of ES Magazine..
