THE GUARDIAN

COMMENT

Kamal Ahmed in London and David Fickling in Sydney
Sunday March 7, 2004
The Observer

The spectre of Carole Caplin and her former boyfriend, the convicted fraudster Peter Foster, came back to haunt the Prime Minister last night with a series of claims about the closeness between Tony Blair and the lifestyle guru.

The claims were immediately dismissed by those close to Blair, who said that Foster was going public merely to promote a book he is hoping to publish in the next few weeks.

According to the allegations made by Foster, who once advised Cherie Blair on the purchase of two flats in Bristol, Blair and Caplin shared late-night telephone conversations and went for long walks in the woods at the Prime Minister's official residence, Chequers.

She also gave him advice on what clothes to wear, down to his underpants. Downing Street immediately dismissed Foster's claims, saying that the Australian, who now lives on Australia's Gold Coast, was an expert at self-promotion.

'Peter Foster is merely trying to drum up publicity for his book,' a spokesman for Number 10 said.

'We have absolutely no intention of taking these claims seriously and neither should anyone else. We have no intention of commenting further.'

Foster, who has described himself as the 'human headline', has made a number of claims that his 140,000-word book could bring down the Prime Minister. Although the Daily Mail is thought to be in possession of a number of emails from Foster making the allegations, the newspaper has said that it has no intention of publishing the claims.

Last week Foster failed to get the emails returned after the Australian courts turned down his request. Foster caused embarrassment for the Prime Minister in 2002 when it was revealed that he had helped Mrs Blair buy two flats in Bristol in what became known as the Cheriegate affair. At the time, Caplin, his girlfriend, was giving 'lifestyle' advice to Cherie and was one of her closest friends.

In an interview published in Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper yesterday, Foster said: 'The heart of my book is the extraordinary influence that Carole has over Tony. People think that Cherie is the ugly duckling whom Carole advised with clothes and make-up and styling.

'The truth is that Tony relied on Carole, too. Carole coached him on how to handle people, how to handle situations and how to present himself. She picked his clothes, right down to his underpants. The intensity and the closeness of their relationship was something I saw and I was amazed by and annoyed by.'

Foster was reportedly paid £500,000 for rights to A Question of Deceit, an upcoming book on the Cheriegate affair being written by Richard Shears, an Australian-based freelance journalist who writes for the Daily Mail.

The injunction launched in Brisbane demanded the return of 5,000 computer files scanned from Foster's computer as background information for the book, but was rejected by the judge on technical grounds.

Foster is a master of the publicity stunt. In the 1980s he falsely claimed that the Duchess of York had attributed her weight loss to a bogus slimming product promoted by him, Bai Lin tea, and he persuaded a Liverpool teenager who had won a slimming competition to put her success down to another of his slimming cures, Guar Gum.

A 'smoking gun' photograph of Foster with the Blairs was reported stolen from the house of Foster's lawyer, Sean Cousins, last year, just before it was meant to be handed over to Shears as evidence of his close relationship to the family.

Cousins insisted that last week's court case was not an attempt to create advance publicity for the book. 'If we wanted to do that, why would we be trying to slap an injunction on it in a closed court?' he said.