Cherie Booth’s side project

The wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair is plenty busy already as a wife, mom, lawyer, and oh yeah, the whole “wife of Prime Minister” thing. So how’d she find time to co-author a legal textbook that hovers around 1,000 pages? The Telegraph decides to find out:

Dan Squires, a fellow member of Matrix Chambers, is named on the title page as co-author. The acknowledgments say that “much of the book was written while Dan Squires was a visiting scholar at Michigan Law School and a fellow of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University”.

The authors thank “four excellent research assistants” in addition to a number of lawyers who commented on parts of the manuscript – including Miss Booth’s brother-in-law, William Blair, QC.

Of course, the authors are quick to deny that Booth wasn’t involved at all, saying that “The book was conceived before Miss Booth co-wrote The Goldfish Bowl, her account of other Downing Street spouses.” And MPs might be a bit miffed about the idea, as Lord Bingham sums up in the book’s foreword: “some people think that a negligent public authority should not have to spend limited funds on meeting private compensation claims, while others say that a body representing the public should collectively compensate an individual member of that public.”

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